With the passing healthcare reform under the Obama administration, a big push and committed mandate was shared that required medical records to go electronic, not only in an effort to make information sharing easier, but also to save trees. Google jumped at the opportunity, but now as the web giant faces looming anti-trust investigations, the move toward electronic medical records (EMR) will be abandoned by Google executives. Google Health and Google PowerMeter are dead.
Google Health senior product manager Aaron Brown and Google green energy czar Bill Weihl stated:
“Both [projects] were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn’t scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.”
Google’s VP of search and user products Marissa Mayer wrote at the time of the Google Health launch about the great benefits of the new service as they began a pilot program with Cleveland Clinic:
“Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online. One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We’re assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you’ll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors’ records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.”
That all sounded amazing but now the plug has been pulled. Google just couldn’t figure out an innovative way of doing it right.
Only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. Some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.
Some states are making headway however privately. Massachusetts for example has developed a plan to fully computerize records at its 14,000 physicians’ offices by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. After a pilot program, the state legislature estimates it will cost about $340 million to build the statewide computer system, with a cost of about $2 million per hospital.
Paper-based records have been in existence for centuries and their gradual replacement by computer-based records has been slowly underway for over twenty years in western healthcare systems. Computerized information systems have not achieved the same degree of penetration in healthcare as that seen in other sectors such as finance, transport and the manufacturing and retail industries. Further, deployment has varied greatly from country to country and from specialty to specialty and in many cases has revolved around local systems designed for local use.
National penetration of EMRs may have reached over 90% in primary care practices in Norway, Sweden and Denmark (2003), but has been limited to 17% of physician office practices in the United States today. Those EMR systems that have been implemented however have been used mainly for administrative rather than clinical purposes.
Electronic medical record systems lie at the center of any computerized health information system. Without them other modern technologies such as decision support systems cannot be effectively integrated into routine clinical workflow. The paperless, interoperable, multi-provider, multi-specialty, multi-discipline computerized medical record, which has been a goal for many researchers, healthcare professionals, administrators and politicians for the past 20+ years.
Sources: Open Clinical and The Official Google Blog
Written by Sy Kraft