Power to the Patients

Network-enabled communication has revolutionized financial services, retail sales, auctions, and business-to-business transactions. But one of the largest global economy´s sectors - healthcare - remains locked in a technological netherworld- part paper, part digital, and almost entirely user- unfriendly. Public officials and healthcare industry executives acknowledge that switching from paper-based to network-enabled digital records would save billions of dollars per year. Google and Microsoft are both fielding pilot programs of new technologies for networked, interoperable electronic health records systems. The new technologies, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, are classified as personal health records (PHRs), which are a subset of industry-recognized electronic health records (EHRs). Eventually, the two technologies will allow patients to synchronize their records between their various healthcare providers, including dynamic uploading of new data that will then be available to any authorized doctor, nurse, or pharmacist, regardless of their institutional affiliation. The approaches are different: Google Health is a front-end application, while HealthVault is a database that users will augment with via third-party applications. However, the goal is the same in both cases: patients will have ultimate control of their medical records.