IBM pitches in on Google Health
February 04, 2009 (Cnet)
One of the elements of President Obama’s stimulus package calls for significant resources to be applied to the Health Care Industry in order to make it more efficient and less costly. One concept that has been under development for many years, and is a cornerstone of the Obama health care reform agenda, is the notion of digitized health records that follows the patient irrespective of doctor, hospital or health insurance carrier.
Google Health, launched in May 2008, offers a service wherein you can store your personal health information all in one place. Microsoft has also planned a health records service to be called Health Vault.
In a recent announcement, Google has signed a new software product created by IBM with help from the Continua Health Alliance, an organization that promotes interoperability of medical devices. The system will take data from personal health monitoring devices, like blood sugar meters for diabetics, and share it directly with the patient’s Google Health file (and the patient's physician, if he or she uses Google Health as well).
Other personal health record (PHR) services will also be able to use the IBM software, which was built partially on open-source standards.
"Our partnership with IBM will help both providers and users gain access to their device data in a highly simplified and automated fashion," Google Health director Sameer Samat said in a release. "IBM has taken an important step in providing software that enables device manufacturers and hospitals to easily upload recorded data into a PHR platform, such as Google Health."
As is the case with any database or information system, accuracy and security are issues. In the case of personal digitized medical records, these elements become an extremely critical matter. YOUnite's patented technology offers a unique solution to ongoing and costly problem of data security and accuracy through the notion of "distributed sharing of personal identity attributes". By applying YOUnite's patented technology to the concept of digitized medical records, for example, the patient would be able to maintain their own medical records on their own personal devices and then selectively share that information with those of their choosing. Other third party companies would not be required to store the patient’s data on the third party networks; therefore dramatically reducing the possibility of highly sensitive medical records becoming compromised, inaccurate or otherwise experiencing malicious attacks as a result of data security breaches.
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