Michael Evans writes in the Globe and Mail:
I don’t often quote George Bush, but he was right when he pointed out in a 2006 presidential discussion on health care that “doctors practice 21st-century medicine, but they still have 19th-century filing systems.”
Patients often wonder, “How come the Instabank in Istanbul tells me exactly how much money is in my account, but my doctor doesn’t have access to that test I did down the street last week?”
Many of you use a 21st-century filing system called Google, relying on its e-mail program or its maps to navigate your life. Now, Google is trying to help you track your health.
Last month, Google announced it is pilot testing its own electronic health record with up to 10,000 volunteer patients at the Cleveland Clinic. An EHR is a digital version or your personal medical record. These records exist, in some form, in the offices of some family doctors, hospitals and labs, but there is no common standard.
In a perfect world, an EHR would create a seamless pathway to share your health information across the continuum of care between your family physician, specialists, labs, hospitals and other health-care providers, no matter where they were located.
When I think of Google I think of simplicity, subtle advertising, “cyberchondria” (an Internet-induced fear of a terrible diagnosis) and cool innovation. When I think of Google in the context of an EHR, I feel both revulsion and attraction. On one hand, my inner conspiracy theorist worries about one of America’s biggest corporations having access to personal medical data. On the other, the riddle of building a universal EHR has thwarted major corporations and governments worldwide and I can’t help but think that Google stands a pretty good chance of creating an elegant solution to a problem I see every day: not having all the facts about a patient at my fingertips.
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