Google on guard of health

Olga Beklemishcheva, Radio LibertyGoogle Corporation has opened the Google Health medical service.

Now everyone can create their own profile and store all their medical documents online on this service. Google claims that no one except the person himself can access this information. But a person can open access to them to a doctor if necessary.

Nikita Shklovsky-Cordi, a leading employee of the Hematology Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, told about the work of the new Google service:

– I think that a major event has occurred in medical informatics. I think it is similar to the fact that Philippe Pinel at the end of the XVIII century removed the chains from the mentally ill, but today it concerns all mankind. An open, free, public service for collecting personal medical information fundamentally changes the situation in medicine. The availability of all information about human health anywhere prevents, firstly, a huge number of errors associated with a lack of information from a doctor when he examines a patient, and secondly, in an emergency. The Western world carefully considers the results of so-called medical errors. But these errors are caused mainly by a lack of information. And these are tens of thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and billions of pointlessly spent money on repeated research.

At the same time, the medical secret is completely preserved. It is the patient who is the owner of medical information. In this service, information is protected from unauthorized access, just like money in a bank deposit. All the money in the world is on the Internet. And this medical information, which the patient will collect and reveal to his doctor, will allow him to feel responsible for his health, and not only to be a subordinate and suffering element in healthcare. It is the patient who should post information about his health on his profile. Of course, there are difficulties in Russia, because most of the information about Russian patients does not exist in electronic form, besides the service is in English.

We also did a similar service. Of course, Google is a giant, and we are not ashamed to lose to it. And we welcome this and think that we will further promote Russian services.

And the fact that Google Health is free and publicly available is an extraordinary success of democracy and freedom.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru26.05.2008