(2009-04-12) Dirty Google Health Data

Youch, a really bad case of Data Quality for Google Health, and by extension other PMR-s. I've been discussing this with the docs in the back room here, and they quickly figured out what was going on before I confirmed it: the system transmitted insurance billing codes to Google Health, not doctors' diagnoses. And as those in the know are well aware, in our system today, insurance billing codes bear no resemblance to reality. (I don't want to get into the whole thing right now, but basically if a doc needs to bill insurance for something and the list of billing codes doesn't happen to include exactly what your condition is, they cram it into something else so the stupid system will accept it.) (And, btw, everyone in the business is apparently accustomed to the system being stupid, so it's no surprise that nobody can tell whether things are making any sense: nobody counts on the data to be meaningful in the first place.)

The BIG question is, do you know what's in your medical record? And THAT is a question worth answering. For every one of you. See, every time I speak at a conference I point out that my 12/6/2003 x-ray identified me as a 53 year old woman. I admit I have the man-boob thing going on, but not THAT much. And here's the next thing: it took me months to get that error corrected, because nobody's in the habit of actually fixing errors... And this isn't just academic: remember the Minnesota kidney cancer tragedy just a year ago, which arose at least partly out of an error that ended up in the hospital's EMR system. Their patient portal allowed patients and family to view some radiology reports, but not the one that contained the fateful error.

The punch line came when I got over my surprise about what had been transmitted, and realized what had not: my history. Weight, BP, and lab data were all still in Patient Site, and not in Google Health.

John Halamka responded with a series of posts: check the Comments especially. John Grohol gives a strongly-worded summary of the spin-reaction, including a link to further hammering by Jay Parkinson.

Epatient Dave, who started this issue, also compiled a list of various encodings, which related to my EHealth Standards list.