Official Google Blog: health

An update on Google Health and Google PowerMeter

June 24, 2011

Google HealthGoogle PowerMeterGoogle Healthgo to the site

Printable PDF including all the records in your Google Health profile

Industry-standard Continuity of Care Record (CCR) XML that can be imported into other personal health tools such as Microsoft® HealthVault™

Comma-separated value (CSV) files that can be imported into spreadsheets and database programs for ongoing tracking and graphing

HTML and XML versions of the original “data notices” sent to your Google Health profile by linked data providers

A unified ZIP archive that includes all files you’ve uploaded to your profile, plus all of the formats above

Direct Projectdata liberationGoogle PowerMeterGoogle PowerMeterStudies showsmart metersannouncedUpdate 7/15/11:Direct ProjectPosted by Aaron Brown, Senior Product Manager, Google Health and Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar

Using search patterns to track dengue fever

May 30, 2011

(Cross-posted on the Google.org Blog)similar patternsGoogle CorrelateGoogle Flu TrendsGoogle Dengue Trendsdengue outbreakCommonwealth GamesProfessor John BrownsteinEmily ChanHealthMapMinistries of HealthWorld Health OrganizationPLoS Neglected Tropical Diseasesadvice of health officialsPosted by Vikram Sahai, Software Engineer

Update from the Google Health Team

March 1, 2010

Health Information and Management Systems SocietyAmerican Recovery and Re-Investment Act of 2009"Meaningful Use"EHR Certificationop-edlearnedSurescriptsUniversity of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)Google HealthCarnegie Mellon UniversitydbMotionCitizen Memorial Healthcare (CMH)Iatric SystemsWithings WiFi Body ScalePosted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research & Special Projects

We’re Going (RED) for World AIDS Day

November 30, 2009

Lazarus Effect

The Global FundWorld AIDS Day page

Learn more about the global effort to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS at UNAIDS, International AIDS Society or LIVING PROOF.

Find volunteer opportunities in your area at All for Good.

Advocate for action with the ONE Campaign.

Give (RED) for friends and family this holiday season.

Unite with others at the Global Network of People Living with HIV.

#redred iGoogle World AIDS Day themeAlicia Keys concert on YouTubeKeep a Child Alive
Update at 3:20PM: Added info about the iGoogle World AIDS Day theme, another way to show your support.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Advocacy Director, Google.org

Finding flu vaccine information in one easy place

November 10, 2009

expandingGoogle Flu TrendsU.S. Department for Health and Human Serviceswww.google.com/flushotwww.flu.govAmerican Lung Association

slower than expected vaccine production
Update on 11/19: We just added the flu shot finder as a search feature on Google.com. Now, if you search for terms like [flu], [flu shot], [h1n1 shot] or [flu vaccine], information will appear at the top of your search results, including flu tips from flu.gov as well as the flu shot finder box with an expanding map that displays locations where you can receive seasonal and/or H1N1 flu shots.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager and Jennifer Haroon, Product Marketing Manager

Fall update on Google Health

October 6, 2009

Google HealthHealth 2.0 conferenceHarvard Pilgrim Health CareAmerican Postal Workers Union Health Plan (APWU Health Plan)APWU Health PlanHarvard Pilgrim Health CareBlue Cross Blue Shield of MAsome data is not as useful as othersMDLiveCareHello Healthimprovements

File Upload: Still dealing with paper files at home? You can now upload files you have scanned or have on your computer, such as test results you previously received in the mail. Each file you upload can be anywhere from 4MB to 100MB. Start by completing and uploading an advance directive.

Insurance Information: You can now store all of your health insurance information in your Google Health profile, including your plan name, plan ID, group number, subscriber and policy ID and member phone number.

Graphing: Keep track of your test results visually to see how key numbers progress over time. If you have more than one cholesterol lab result saved in your profile, you can view these results over time in a graph and track your progress.

feedbackPosted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager

Listening to Google Health users

April 27, 2009

bloggedBeth Israel Deaconess Medical CenterInternational Classification of Diseases (ICD-9)CIO John HalamkaDr. Danny SandsNational Library of Medicine (NLM)SNOMED-CTHealth 2.0informative postPosted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager, Google Health

CVS joins Google Health Rx network: millions can access medication records online

April 6, 2009

several other well-known national and regional pharmacy chains1.5 million Americanssee if your pharmacy is connected with Google Healthsharing featureMedcoCVS Caremark

Posted by Maneesh Arora, Product Manager, Google Health

Getting your Medicare records in Google Health

March 30, 2009

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)U.S. Department of Health and Human Servicesstimulus packagelaunchedsharing featureget started herePosted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager, Google Health

Google Health: helping you better coordinate your care

March 4, 2009

launching Google Health

The sharing link in the email expires after 30 days, but the sharing access itself does not expire — it will stay in place until the user decides to stop sharing

Viewers can only see — not edit — your Google Health profile

You can review a user activity report to see who has viewed your profile

For doctors and family members who are not yet online, we've also made it easier to share a hard copy of your information via our new printing feature. The wallet format prints a wallet-sized card that includes a user's medications, and allergies; the PDF format prints a letter-sized copy of a user's profile, including medications, allergies, conditions, and treatments.

Finally, we've launched a new graphing feature that helps patients visualize their medical test information. This is great for, say, someone who has high cholesterol. They can use Google Health to enter their lab results on a monthly basis and see the trend over time.

There is still a lot more work to do on Google Health, and we're excited to keep hearing from you so we can continue to make improvements. For now, we hope this new sharing feature makes coordinating your care, or the care of loved ones, a little easier.

Update on 3/6: Clarified the first bullet point.

Posted by Sameer Samat, Director, Product Management

Helping healthcare providers become more efficient

December 4, 2008

webinarGoogle HealthEnterprise blogPosted by Sundar Raghavan, Google Enterprise Team

How we help track flu trends

November 12, 2008

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.football scoreshotelannounced Google Flu TrendsGoogle TrendsThe New York Timescheck out the toolhow Flu Trends worksserver logsanonymizeFAQsprivacy policysafeguardingPosted by Pablo Chavez, Senior Policy Counsel

Google Health feels accessible

October 14, 2008

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

Keeping track of personal health records using printed paper is painful at best for most users; as someone with a visual impairment, this is a show-stopper for me. As I begin paying more attention to my own health, I've come to realize first-hand how hard it is at present to track one's health using the means that traditional health care programs provide.

As luck would have it, Google Health arrived at around the same time that I started dealing with these issues, and focusing on the usability of Google Health from the perspective of someone who cannot see was therefore a no-brainer. Today, we are launching a version of Google Health that has been augmented with several usability enhancements that aid users of screen readers and self-voicing browsers. These enhancements are implemented using W3C ARIA, an emerging set of Web standards that make AJAX applications work smoothly with screen readers — see our related post on the GWT blog for details. With these enhancements, I can now easily navigate Google Health to not only manage my own health records; Google Health enables me to quickly research various relevant health conditions, track medications and do a myriad health-related tasks.

Google Health gives me a single unified web interface to manage all of my health-related information. Kudos to the Google Health and GWT teams for creating an extremely useful and usable solution!

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Wiping out the next smallpox

September 23, 2008

The Internet has had an enormous impact on people's lives around the world in the ten years since Google's founding. It has changed politics, entertainment, culture, business, health care, the environment and just about every other topic you can think of. Which got us to thinking, what's going to happen in the next ten years? How will this phenomenal technology evolve, how will we adapt, and (more importantly) how will it adapt to us? We asked ten of our top experts this very question, and during September (our 10th anniversary month) we are presenting their responses. As computer scientist Alan Kay has famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it, so we will be doing our best to make good on our experts' words every day. - Karen Wickre and Alan Eagle, series editorsWorld Health OrganizationRotary InternationalCarter CenterPredict and PreventPosted by Dr. Larry Brilliant, Google.org

A peek into our search factory

May 19, 2008

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

quotes from newsmakersfind Roman villa in someone's backyard Google Healthwrotepartnersthird party servicesWalgreensQuest DiagnosticsLongs Drugsprivacy policiespublic policy blogGo for GoodiGoogleUpdates:

Google Health, a first look

February 28, 2008

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search & User Products announcedHIMSSWatch the video.
Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.

For the healthcare industry, online personal health records (PHRs) aren't a new idea and, in some cases, online PHRs already exist for patients. Here's what we think sets Google Health apart:

Privacy and Security - Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data that will be stored in Google Health, we need to conduct our health service with the same privacy, security, and integrity users have come to expect in all our services. Google Health will protect the privacy of your health information by giving you complete control over your data. We won't sell or share your data without your explicit permission. Our privacy policy and practices have been developed in thoughtful collaboration with experts from the Google Health Advisory Council.

Platform - One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We're assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you'll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors' records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.

Portability - Our Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. Through the Cleveland Clinic pilot, we have already found great use-cases in which, for example, people spend 6 months of the year in Ohio, and 6 months of the year in Florida or Arizona, and will now be able to move their health data between their various health providers seamlessly and with total control. Previously, this would have required carrying paper records back and forth. With Google Health, the user can simply import the data from each medical facility and then choose to share it with the other facilities. It's advances in data portability like this that we think can really make a difference in the quality of healthcare. The clearer and more comprehensive the information regarding your health becomes, the better your care will be.

User focus - We aren't doctors or healthcare experts, but one thing Google can create is a clean, easy-to-use user experience that makes managing your health information straightforward and easy. We're still iterating and testing our user interface, but here is what the welcome screen looks like:

Here is a screenshot deeper in the application:
We're proud of the product that we've designed and are continuing to build, but recognize that we are just at the initial stages of our "launch early and iterate" strategy. We look forward to the feedback we will receive from our Cleveland Clinic pilot, from all of you, and from the initial users of our service when we make it publicly available in the coming months.

Update: Added link to video of Eric's talk; refreshed second screenshot.

A pilot with the Cleveland Clinic for health information access

February 21, 2008

Posted by Alan Newberger, Engineering ManagerhadGData protocolyourThe Cleveland Clinic

Google and health care

July 2, 2007

Posted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Managerreactionproponents of corporate bloggingNovember 30, 2006March 28May 23June 14, 2007

New advisory group on health

June 27, 2007

Posted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing ManagerGoogle Health Advisory Council(Institutions or affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.)Dean OrnishDouglas Bell, M.D., Ph.D., Research Scientist, RAND Health, RAND Corporation Delos M. Cosgrove, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, The Cleveland Clinic

Molly Coye, M.D., M.P.H., Chief Executive Officer, HealthTech Dan Crippen, Former Congressional Budget Office Director & Reagan White House Assistant Linda M. Dillman, Executive Vice President, Risk Management, Benefits and Sustainability, Wal-MartJohn Halamka M.D., M.S., Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center & Harvard Medical School and Chairman, Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) Bernadine Healy M.D., Former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Health Editor & Columnist, U.S. News & World Report Bernie Hengesbaugh, Chief Operating Officer, The American Medical Association (AMA) Douglas E. Henley, M.D., F.A.A.F.P., Executive Vice President, American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) David Kessler, M.D.,Former FDA Commissioner, Vice Chancellor-Medical Affairs & Dean, School of Medicine, UCSF John Lumpkin M.D, Senior Vice President, Director of Health Care Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation John Rother, Group Executive Officer of Policy & Strategy, AARP Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Vice President, Online Services, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. Greg Simon, J.D., President, FasterCures Mark D. Smith, M.D., MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer, The California HealthCare Foundation Paul Tang, M.D., Internist & Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) & Chairman, Board of Directors, American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Sharon Terry, M.A., President & Chief Executive Officer, Genetic AllianceJohn Tooker, M.D., MBA, F.A.C.P., Executive Vice President & Chief Executive Officer, American College of Physicians (ACP) Doug Ulman, President, Lance Armstrong Foundation Robert M. Wachter, M.D., Professor of Medicine, University of California-San Francisco (UCSF); Associate Chairman, UCSF Department of Medicine; Chief of the Medical Service, UCSF Medical Center Matthew Zachary, Cancer Patient Advocate, Founder & Executive Director, The I'm Too Young for This! Cancer Foundation for Young AdultsUpdate: Added links to two more bios.

Is there a doctor in the family?

June 14, 2007

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager, Googlethis one

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