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Internet
Articles
The Virtual Public Square
Alan Jacobs reviews Richard John Neuhaus’s final book
The True Face of Digital Democracy
Sebastian Waisman on the Internet and civic engagement
The Rise of Cyber-Schools
Online Education and Its Enemies
Liam Julian
Staying Afloat
Treading Water in a Sea of Data
Peter Suderman
Is Stupid Making Us Google?
James Bowman on the “Dumbest Generation”
Does Digital Politics Still Matter?
Robert Atkinson and Shane Ham on the battles over information technology
Caught in the Act
Tracking Cheating Hearts in the Cyber-Age
The Science Journal Crisis
Disappearing Articles, Skyrocketing Costs, and Open Access
Paper and Pixel
The Web Takes Note of Books, Reference Books Discover the Web
Porn, Privacy, and Kids
Congressional Attempts to Make the Internet Child-Friendly
Next
Blog Posts
Google Health and Your Health
This week, Google unveiled Google Health, its long-awaited portal for storing patient medical records. This is another promising development in the long, slow movement to better use of information technology (IT) in health care. As matters stand, most patient records are stored on paper and housed inaccessibly in physicians’ offices, despite the revolution in IT which has transformed most other sectors of the American economy (see my New Atlantis article “The Clipboard of the Future” for more on the health IT conundrum).
The new Google portal is free to users. Data must be entered into the system by participating medical providers or the patients themselves. So far, Google has signed up a handful of high-profile participating providers, including the highly respected Cleveland Clinic. Patients getting care with these providers can have their medical information automatically uploaded into their Google Health account. But, most physicians and hospitals do not yet have the ability to easily place patient data onto the Internet, so Google Health users will have to rely on themselves to keep their patient information complete and up-to-date.
Google’s new health venture will compete directly with Microsoft’s Health Vault, launched in 2007. Both companies have invested heavily in privacy protection to give users confidence that their online patient records are secure.
