I have been asked a few times where I find things to blog about. Usually I blog about something from work at my library or something I have read from one of my many RSS feeds. This time the information came from good ol' mom who emailed me (and left me a voice mail) about an article she saw about the Cleveland Clinic and Google partnering to create an online Patient Health Record (PHR).


According to the article, it is a pilot project involving 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records to be retrieved through Google's new service. The Cleveland Clinic already keeps personal health records on over 120,000 patients, so this Google service is really just a drop in the bucket. The Cleveland Clinic decided to work with Google to make it easier patients to get their health information quickly even when they aren't being treated by the Cleveland Clinic.


My guess is this would come in handy for people who travel a lot and for whatever reason might need medical attention outside of the Cleveland area. As a mother traveling with small kids I could envision having medical consent documents attached to the record so that grandparents could take the children to see the doctor when the parents are unavailable.


Of course privacy advocates are worried about Google already having too much access to our private information. There is also the issue of trusting Google. John Sharp wonders whether consumers will trust Google to store their medical records. "My guess is the there is a 50/50 split on this - those who think it is adequately secure and those who are suspicious or fearful."


I don't think the idea of having their medical records online is the stumbling block, I think it is having it in something like Google. Many people already bank online, view their mortgage online, access their credit card statements online. Online access and availablity is very popular. However, the information is stored in the banking or financial institution's system. Personally I trust those institutions to keep that type information more secure than I would Google or Yahoo. If Google and the Cleveland Clinic are talking about the ability for patients to access their patient health records anywhere then why not make that feature available directly from the Cleveland Clinic using MyChart? Just curious.


I think the idea of online poratability of health care information is a good idea. If you are traveling or you have moved and you need to see a doctor, having all that information available can be very helpful and improve care. Of course the medical librarian in me thinks it would be really cool if MedlinePlus or other reputable online consumer health resources could be integrated into the PHR so that consumers could click on a drug term and view information and complications. It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out.