Google Health: A Quick Hands-On Look

Now that Google Health has finally launched, I took a quick peek at it while Mark was taking notes at today’s Google Factory Tour presentation. It’s been a long time coming, but at first glance it looks like it will be a strong competitor to existing personal health sites such as Microsoft’s HealthVault (which launched last October), Revolution Health, or Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline).

The big competition here is between Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault. (Revolution Health is more of an information portal at this point, and who is going to trust their health insurance company?). Whereas HealthVault’s strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles. HealthVault allows this as well, but seems to have stronger partnerships with back-end health data providers. Google will no doubt tackle the existing health data silos as it proceeds. It really has no choice if it wants to organize the world’s health information.

To gain consumer acceptance, Google promises never to advertise on Google Health (although ads in related searches should be fair game) and that people’s personal health information will never appear in search results (one would hope not). Members can add their doctors to their Gmail contacts and APis are n the works.

In order for Google Health to be of much use, you need to tell it about your health history by creating a personal medical profile. It is easy enough to get started. You tell it your age, weight, medical conditions, medications, allergies, and so on. It provides guided keyword suggestions, so that when you type in a symptom, for instance, you get a list of health terms.

But the key is importing your medical record in there. That is going to be a huge hurdle in terms of people feeling comfortable giving that sort of data to Google in the first place, and then simply getting the data in an electronic form from their doctors.

Google Health lists only eight partners so far from which it can import medical records, and half of them only cover drugs (Medco, Walgreens, RXAmerica, and Longs Drug Stores). The others are Quest Diagnostics (for lab tests), MinuteClinic from CVS Caremark, and two hospitals: the Cleveland Clinic, and Beth Isreal Deaconness Medical Center.

Even if your doctor sent you a file with your complete medical record, it is not clear that you could upload it (although you could enter it by hand). It also does not let you import data directly from medical devices, a feature that Microsoft’s HealthVault does have.

Google has also created specific in-depth pages for hundreds of health topics. When you enter a condition into your profile, there is a reference link to one of these pages where you can do more research. These are really helpful. They give a summary of the symptoms, treatment, causes, and prevention of different conditions; illustrations where appropriate, as well as links to related news, Google Groups, and search trends. Here is one for “Sciatica,”for instance.

Google Health also lets you link your profile to a number of other online health services. These include ePillBox.info (medication scheduler), a heart attack risk calculator, iHealth, Livestrong.com, MyDailyApple (daily health news), MyMedicalRecords,com, and NoMoreClipboard. If Google Health wants to be the central repository of your online health profile, it needs to allow you to share your profile with as many other services as possible. You are able to grant different levels of permission to each service.

HealthVault has its own list of partner sites (American Heart Association, CapMed, HealthMedia, Healthy Circles, Kryptiq, Peaksware, Pure Wellness,Sound Health Soultions, US Wellness, Podfitness, MyVitalStatistics, Limeade, and Active Health).

Google is planning to open up APIs to Google health to make it easy for other partners to tap into its health platform. And make no mistake about it. That is what this is: a platform. Health apps anyone?

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FARANGI IN TOWN: Is this Pakistan?

FARANGI IN TOWN: Is this Pakistan? —Ella Rolfe

The middle classes, especially the young, do not have a sense of belonging to Pakistan; do not care for anything it produces; would rather display their status by seeing an expensive, over-hyped, big-budget Bollywood film than show any interest in things Pakistani

‘This is Pakistan.’ How many times have I heard this since arriving? The implication: of course things don’t work. What did you expect?

This has always seemed to me a nonsensical attitude: quite clearly, things do work in this country. You live here, and you know it’s not a bombed out wasteland populated only by suicide bombers and mullahs, I want to shout at those who say this to me. Why are you looking at me patronisingly as if I myself have invented a decently stable Pakistan out of thin air?

Such are the rantings that, inside my head, feel justified. Gratifyingly, I recently had a conversation with another westerner that backed up my views. A music teacher at the University of Punjab, he obviously sensed my sympathy on this subject, and took the opportunity to rant along with me. The two of us had a great time.

With his first year students, he makes a point of analysing a Pashto song in order to point out to them that it’s not a ‘folk song’, but is very modern and can in fact be considered pop music. They are always scandalised by this. Getting the mostly Punjabi students to engage with a rich musical tradition, something he feels is largely absent from Punjabi culture, is one thing; getting them to acknowledge that it is any way new or innovative is quite another. They insist to the end that this is not only traditional folk music, but ‘our traditional folk music’.

Such a skewed and confused set of identifications with Pakistan — no acknowledgement of the diversity of the country, nor of its ability to produce anything fresh — seems to me to be a common phenomenon among young people.

These students, as they claim for themselves something they have no knowledge of, illustrate the paradox that while young Pakistanis are looking for something to lay claim to, they haven’t found it because they don’t actually care about Pakistan all that much.

My teacher friend has heard any number of students claim in debate that ‘this is not our country’; some even talk of reunification with India as the best solution. He laments the westernisation of Pakistan, blaming this on access to the international arena through the country’s explosion of TV stations in the last five years and saying that in another ten, Pakistan will be just like Egypt — homogenous.

He himself may even be part of this, employed under a deliberate Musharraf policy to back the university’s music programme with a westerner. He also decries the decline of the Pakistani film industry, choked out by air-filled, meaningless Bollywood produce that has been westernised and product-placed to death even despite attempts by the Indian government to expel multinational companies from the country (they ‘invited’ Pepsi to leave in 2005).

The middle and wealthier classes still watch the Bollywood films, he says; the poor don’t go to the cinema any more, as they neither understand the foreign storylines nor enjoy the songs, which are awful.

This class divide chimes with what I have concluded about Pakistan’s upwardly mobile youth. The middle classes, especially the young, do not have a sense of belonging to Pakistan; do not care for anything it produces; would rather display their status by seeing an expensive, over-hyped, big-budget Bollywood film than show any interest in things Pakistani.

The papers are full of complaints that the government should regulate electricity consumption by the rich, with their extravagant parties and air conditioners pumping in empty rooms; is it possible that the wealthy of Pakistan do not care if they are destroying their country? This is Pakistan — there is no expectation of anything useful being produced. Anyone who can afford to wants to get out of the country as soon as they can.

Alas, when faced with such attitudes the little ranting gremlin inside my head is back. ‘Things are never going to change if you think like that, are they?’ it taunts. Filtered into more rational speech, it has a point: there is a need to re-engage young people in their home country and its politics. They need to be given a reason to care.

Source: Daily Times

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