(2006-12-01) Bosworth Google Health

Adam Bosworth lays out some of the rationale for Google Health. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:

• What was wrong - it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms

• Who should treat her - there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local Physician-s and Care-Giver-s (Reputation Management), which ones were covered by her Health Insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her

• Once she was treated, she had a Chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred. I guess it's time to start writing Using Base Camp To Coordinate Family Caregiving...

In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. 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. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the Google CoOp platform, 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.

Dec'2006: this speech focuses more on the Open Data aspect. Every ill person needs a "health URL," an online meeting place where the their caregivers - with express permission from the ill person - can come together, pass on notes to each other, review each other's notes, look at the medical data (PMR), and suggest courses of action... We don't need measures that merely help doctors manage their practices or get a few more images into the operating theatre. We need to put control into the hands of the sick and their caregivers and to gently suggest that those who treat them, medicate them, test them, or diagnose them, are out of date if they do not instantly deliver this information to the patient. Once this happens, we will see truly great decision support systems and specialists and health coaches help the hapless patients much more rapidly determine what is truly wrong with them.