Dr. Google's Healthcare Plans
In this interesting post at the official Google Blog, Adam Bosworth, the Vice President of Google, talks about his plans for Google's Health Services.Fuelled by his personal experience with the American healthcare system and processes, and the tragic demise of her monther due to cancer, Bosworth says that Google's healthcare plans are his main focus now!
I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations.
Bosworth looks like he strongly believes that
If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment.
He further says,
Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need.
The search example by Bosworth throws light at the future direction that Google search algorithm might take, at least with the healthcare search to begin with -
Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.
In effect Google says it will allow human intervention to manipulate its search results at least for individuals to deliver more effective and relevant search results.
Whoa... must be another "first", once again by the search engine giant.
However, how much the Americans will believe in the worth of the new healthcare search is anybody's guess.
But one thing is for sure, the privacy issues involved in this must be a point of debate as the patients storing their healthcare related information on Google.
As it is currently with Google's most other offerings, will Google choose to be as off-hand with its privacy policy and how it stores and uses the data as it is now, or will it change its stance to win consumer confidence?
If Google chooses to follow the same privacy policy, it still can manage to net a large user base for its healthcare search services. I is very plausible considering its large base of users, many of whom do not bother themselves with reading the privacy poilcy and those few who do, do not understand the implications!
But one thing can not be denied. The data that Google might collect on patients and the user base of the Google Healthcare Services itself, are of immense marketing value being extremely targeted from the point of view of medica service establishments, individual medical practitioners, prescription drug companies, insurance companies etc.
Now the question is - Is Google really thinking about the welfare of the patients or does it have its eyes focussed on the revenue that this new service has the potential to bring in?!?!
Any which way... Yahoo and MSN must be getting worried, with their management having nightmares and losing sleep over the pace at which Google not only announces but comes out with revolutionay concepts.
Tags: Google, Google Healthcare, Health, Healthcare, Research, Search Engine, MSN, Yahoo, Sleep, Nightmares, Privacy, Doctors, Privacy Policy, Diagnosis, Medical, Medical Practitioners, Prescription Drugs, Privacy Issues, Insurance, Marketing
