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Google is exploring a health record tool for patients
- buran77 6y agoMaybe it's just me but there's something deeply disturbing about the idea of Google also hoarding medical data...
- duncan-donuts 6y agoDefinitely not just you. Google is just about the last company I’d want my health records stored.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoCan you name a more trustworthy one for this purpose?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoAnybody who doesn't base their whole business around ignoring privacy so they can target their ads better?
- throwaway3699 6y agoWithout turning into a complete shill, there are many companies well known for abusing and selling your data. Having seen that abuse first-hand, Google is still one of the better ones when it comes to having good internal safeguards and policies -- but they get so much attention for their scale and breadth of data.
- buran77 6y agoOne big problem I see is that Google already has a lot of data. Just having that much aggregated data makes any company a bad choice.
- frongpik 6y agoIt needs to be a regulated nonprofit independent entity. Trusting an ads corp your medical data is as good as asking a bunch of junkies to look after your home while you're away on vacation.
- mam2 6y ago> regulated nonprofit independent entity. Which will be hacked in 2 weeks of its existence..
- frongpik 6y agoNonprofit doesn't mean cheap. I see it as a defence contractor of some sort: it gets big money from the gov, hires the best staff, but is also regulated and doesn't report to wall st.
- goatinaboat 6y agoMaybe it's just me but there's something deeply disturbing about the idea of Google also hoarding medical data... If you have ever googled a symptom, they know, and unlike HIPAA there is no regulation on what they do with that data.
- grej 6y agoI don’t want to be the product with my medical data, thanks.
- greesil 6y agoDidn't they try to do this as Google Health > 10 years ago?
- turnerc 6y agoThey did and retired it 4 years later saying they couldn't turn "limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people"[0]. People didn't like the idea then, and I'm not sure they will adopt it this time around... [0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html#Blog1:~:text=But%20we%20haven%E2%80%99t%20found%20a%20way,health%20routines%20of%20millions%20of%20people https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-hea...
- prepend 6y agoYes, it was ok and annoying when they shut it down because all the health records were proprietary so a huge pain to move stuff over. I wonder if the product managers know that Google tried this. I’m not sure I’d ever trust Google again with a health record. Also since they can de-identify and advertise based on health condition across all of Google that’s a privacy nightmare for me. And I think since a health record where you enter your data isn’t HIPAA protected, then who knows what they’ll do with the data.
- sdenton4 6y ago"all the health records were proprietary" is, as I understand it, the description of the broad status quo. There's no standard format, and many functionally-ok versions running at thousands of different hospitals, so it's apparently nigh impossible to solve the problem. See the other comments about everyone trying this and failing... It's honestly the sort of thing where you should have a standard created by an independent group designing a standard, which is then implemented by the government (handling storage and release of records to local providers).
- clairity 6y ago> “There's no standard format, and many functionally-ok versions running at thousands of different hospitals, so it's apparently nigh impossible to solve the problem.” this is actually the perfect breeding ground for a highly serviceable solution. thousands of at-bats to solve a thorny complicated problem. the challenge is bringing that whole breadth of knowledge to bear on said standards-making process. inter-/intra-group politics often gets in the way, but that is also solvable with good leadership and trust-making processes.
- kreeben 6y ago"any health data gathered as part of the feedback program will not be sold or used for Google ads" But not after the feedback program has finished? "The information will be encrypted" So that only Google can read it? "and stored in the cloud" Yes, of course. What can possibly go wrong. Hope this fails in the grandest of fashions long before they go to market.
- henearkr 6y agoIf it's encrypted and only you have the key, then it doesn't matter where it's stored. You can even publish it, it would just be random gibberish without the key. They just need to ensure that's the client side that deciphers the data, and that the private key never leaves the browser side neither. I think that can be audited through JS debug tools.
- hedora 6y agoIt would need to be audited one each time the browser downloaded the JS. Otherwise, the server can trivially decrypt the data by serving malicious JavaScript once the audit is complete. Anyway, this is Google. There’s no way they’re planning to client-side encrypt. Even if they did, they’d eventually realize it wasn’t generating enough indirect ad revenue to be too big to kill. At that point they’d ungracefully shut it down.
- martinflack 6y ago> If it's encrypted and only you have the key, then it doesn't matter where it's stored. Until advances in mathematics or computation obsolete the crypto. We might decide that it doesn't matter within each respective patient's lifetime (a debate) but that is getting longer and longer.
- ralph84 6y agoSounds great in theory, but in practice end users suck at key management. Just look at how many Bitcoin wallets are gone forever because the wallet owner lost the private key.
- foepys 6y ago
- henearkr 6y agoActually that's something really needed. Most of the time, the more detailed reports you show to your physician the more they are overwhelmed, so I hope it would manage to become a new standard where the doctor can easily find what they look for.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peytn 6y agoLuckily it’s unlikely to gain traction. Hospital execs still bring up how they were screwed over by Google 10 years ago whenever you try to sell them on consumer health records products. Their malfeasance is legendary at this point.
- teddyh 6y agoJust think of all the interesting data they will aggregate! (This is a recycled comment from 2017¹.) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15565018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15565018
- jascii 6y agoAside from the privacy concerns, I'm not sure I'd want to put data my life may depend on in a product from a company with a track record of randomly dropping products with little to no lead time.
- foobiekr 6y agoAnd randomly locking accounts.
- xnx 6y agoI already trust Google with my email, search, and location history. Health records feel like a very small addition to that. I would trust a health records service from Google far more than I would from any insurance agency or health care provider I can think of.
- jeffbee 6y agoRight? Existing health records systems are all either obviously insecure (Windows systems where everyone is using a shared account/password, no MFA, uncertain disposal of broken and obsolete storage devices, etc) or pure theater (you are emailed links to fly-by-night vendor sites that pretend to make a big deal out of serving you a "secure" blob). Google cloud provides protection from the actual privacy threats I care about: insider access, hacked account credentials, and disposed hard disk drives.
- kreeben 6y agoVery curious why you threw Windows under the bus there. >> Google cloud provides protection from the actual privacy threats Even if everyone in the clinic uses the same credentials?
- jeffbee 6y agoProbably yes. An account that logs in from numerous devices will get locked out promptly.
- reaperducer 6y agoWindows systems where everyone is using a shared account/password, no MFA, uncertain disposal of broken and obsolete storage devices, etc This was true back in the 1990's. But hardly ever happens anymore. Healthcare operations are very strictly regulated, and everyone, even small offices, goes through security training. If they don't, they lose access to the things they need to operate. The company I work for puts everyone in the company through HIPAA training once a year, and IT security training every six months. It doesn't matter if you're a receptionist, or a doctor, or the Director of IT. Everyone gets the training.
- nyxtom 6y agoGoogle Health was a disaster and there weren’t very many hospitals that adopted it in the end. Medical information record databases are notoriously siloed. Not to mention I have a difficult time trusting the longevity of many of googles projects
- reaperducer 6y agoI work in healthcare, but I only build web sites and portals and things like that. The people who work on the data and records side have some of the hardest jobs in the company. I don't envy them. This feels like yet another case of Google thinking it can throw machines and algorithms at a problem and a solution will magically appear. It won't. Search is hard. Healthcare is harder. Way harder. Healthcare data is a never-ending log flume of exceptions, regulations, exceptions to regulations, and laws that change from week to week, or sometimes even day to day. And the data can sometimes be exceptionally dirty, in a way that only human intervention can clean it up. The only way it all gets managed is with people. And Google hates wetware. Its entire reason for being is to abstract away the humans and replace them with math. That may work good enough for e-mail, or games, but it doesn't work for people. And it certainly doesn't work for healthcare, where "good enough" means people die.
- thallium205 6y agoOnly those in healthcare understand this. The thought of Google trying to pull data out of an Epic or an eClinicalWorks cracks me up.
- throwaway3699 6y agoI would consider looking at who runs Google Health before making that statement. David Feinberg is one of the few people with the right experience that can pull Google in the right direction if they want to go into healthcare. https://health.google/our-team/ https://health.google/our-team/ https://www.blog.google/technology/health/david-feinberg-google-health/ https://www.blog.google/technology/health/david-feinberg-goo...
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- sorokod 6y ago"any health data gathered as part of the feedback program will not be sold or used for Google ads" The right thing would have been to commit to exclusively specific use. Instead we have an incomplete enumeration of what it would not be used for.
- grenoire 6y agoCurrently the most common and advanced practice I've seen is the FHIR format (https://www.hl7.org/ https://www.hl7.org/). This is not your usual step-tracking app, it's a data exchange format for hospitals and clinics. I think that's what this release is about because I know that Google has been interested in the FHIR protocol specifically. Microsoft and other large corporations are also exploring FHIR and similar systems, it's not as dreadful as you might think. It looks like the idea is to bring the real data sharing protocols to the patient level, which is going to be an interesting challenge for them. The comments regarding traction etc. are all valid, there are many angles in the healthcare technology business. Google might be one of the few companies which can get the money and momentum in it. Whether that's desirable or not is for you to ponder.
- Angostura 6y agoFWIW FHIR is also the protocol that Apple Health uses to integrate with the NHS records system.
- reaperducer 6y agoThere's a massive world of health data out there beyond FHIR. If Google thinks it can do something useful with FIHR, then good for Google. But it will only solve a very small part of the healthcare data problem.
- throwaway3699 6y agoFWIW FHIR is already supported by Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/healthcare/docs/concepts/fhir https://cloud.google.com/healthcare/docs/concepts/fhir
- grenoire 6y agoThis is on the supplier end, not the patient end.
- jonwithoutanh 6y agoIt's not that simple. Epic provides a FHIR API but if you try and use it you'll see that they do not adhere to the spec at all. And each different EHR provider that I attempted to interface with through FHIR all had different, broken, implementations of the spec.
- mplewis 6y agoGoogle needs to stay out of our health data.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoWith google's track record for keeping services up and also their general attitude with data I don't see a good outcome for this project. It would make more sense if they were taking wearables / pixel phones more seriously but I guess this is primarily a data grab.
- itg 6y agoBased on previous stories of people losing access to their Google accounts and can't get answer as to why, no thanks.
- citizenpaul 6y agoOther than facebook I can't think of a company that I would trust less with my health data than google.
- throwawaysea 6y agoGoogle has way too much information about everyone, even if they try to avoid them. I do not want them or Amazon becoming the new healthcare gatekeepers. I would much rather see them split up and have healthier, more diverse competition in the market. I would also want health information to be very siloed, away from any other interests such as advertising.
- bawana 6y agoThe unspoken fact is that the people who make the decisions about adopting EHR are very conscious that 'he who controls the information, controls the reimbursement'. There is no way on this planet that a hospital will hand over its data to someone who could actually make sense of it and make them look bad. The outrageous and inconsistent bills they send to the uninsured compared to the deals they cut with insurance companies run by their buddies would look bad. very bad.