Cool Technology of the Week

Yesterday, Google Health quietly launched a disruptive technology - social networking for personal health records.

Here's how it works.

In your Google Health profile, you click on Share this Profile. You can then invite anyone by email to share your medical record. To test the application, I invited my wife to join (see screen shot above).

Once you've invited others to see your medical record you can monitor audit trails of who has accessed your records, what they saw and when the looked. You can remove access at any time.

On the receiving end, your invitees receive an email with login instructions to view your medical records. They cannot change or add to your records. All their actions are audited.

Everything is done securely via HTTPS.

As a country, we continue to debate the appropriate privacy policy for sharing records in ways that protect confidentiality. We continue to work on technology solutions that restrict the flow of information to those we need to see it, when they need to see it, with the minimum need to know. These are all hard problems.

The Google solution, introduced without fanfare, solves many confidentiality issues by putting the patient in control of medical record sharing. Call it "Facebook for Healthcare". You invite those who you believe should see your medical information and you can disinvite them at anytime.

I've already invited my primary care doctor, my family, and a few of my clinical systems colleagues who built the BIDMC-Google interface. Thus, in one morning I've become my own regional health information organization, sharing medical records across multiple organizations with perfect privacy controls.

Social Networking for Personal Health Records - that's cool!