Google & Your Health Records

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I’d heard some rumblings about this a while back, but today it became fact. The Cleveland Clinic & Google are teaming up to store your health records. Granted this is just a pilot project of between 1,500 and 10,000 people, but it’s a step toward Google knowing even more about you. According to the NY Times report,

“The Google personal health record, he [Dr. C. Martin Harris, Cleveland Clinic CIO] said, is a solution to that problem, among others. A person can approve the transfer of information on, say, medical conditions, allergies, medications and laboratory results from the clinic’s computers to a Google personal health record — a series of secure Web pages.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little leery about Google knowing what allergies I have or what medications I may take. They already know what searches I run, sift through my email for keywords and know what RSS feeds I have, why do I want to give them that much personal information? I’d much rather the records be kept at the clinic for doctors and nurses to look at and not have Google, Microsoft, or any other company snooping through them. (Microsoft’s product is called HealthVault.)

I realize that this is only a pilot project, but I’m sure it’s not going to go away. Because of that, I think that there will be a significant backlash to this. I realize that a lot of people already give away a lot of information just by their online activity and the cookies (not the edible ones) associated with surfing the net, but this just seems a little extreme. I wonder how they’re going to get enough people to accept Google’s intrusion into their medical records? Google is not your insurance company but it kind of reminds me of why people don’t want insurance companies to have access to their medical records. In that case, the insurer could raise rates based on someone’s susceptibility to various diseases. In Google’s case, they could send you targeted ads based on whether or not you have diabetes (do you want Wilfred Brimley’s ads on your computer screen all the time?) or some other ailment.

Here’s another thing to consider. According to Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, third party products like this are not required to follow Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). HIPPA “classif[ies] medical information as a privileged communication between a doctor and patient” and “requires a doctor to notify a patient when subpoenaed for a medical record.” Since this Google project wouldn’t be part of that, the government or some other entity could have easier access to your medical records.

Privacy in an online world is becoming harder and harder to accomplish. The only real solution is to not go online at all and that’s nearly impossible to do. For Siva Vaidhyanathan’s take on privacy and surveillance, read his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Naked in the Nonopticon.” It doesn’t address Google’s health records project, but can easily be interpreted to include it.

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Tags: Google, privacy