i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." One of their more obscure organizational endeavors is Google Health, which just got a redesign. Google Health allows users to enter, track, and organize their personal medical information. The latest update includes "an easier-to-use dashboard that brings together even more of your health and wellness information in one place." I checked out Google Health back when it was first launched but didn't end up using it at all, so after reading this blog post about it I figured it was time to revisit.

Google has been taking strides to partner with more healthcare providers and other sources of wellness information, but the site still largely depends on users manually entering information. Maybe if you're the kind of person who weighs yourself everyday, entering it on a website isn't much of a stretch, but how many people have the ability to measure their own cholesterol or blood pressure? I love the idea of having a graph generated for my BMI or cholesterol, but I am not motivated to provide regular data points myself. I hope Google is just ahead of the times -- the transition to electronic health records, as we read in the Baron et. al. paper, is not easy and a lot of organizations (including the UC Berkeley Tang Center) haven't fully made it yet.

In addition to a new personalizable dashboard with data and graphs, Google Health now gives users the ability to take notes on medical conditions or medications, which helps integrate more qualitative information. To me, the combination of automatic data collection and user-input is powerful and appealing; two of my favourite "Web 2.0" websites are last.fm and Mint.com, both of which gather information automatically but also enable the user to add, edit, or remove items (music tracks on Last.fm and financial trasactions on Mint). I can certainly imagine using Google Health down the road when it provides the same sort of semi-automated organization of my health information that I currently have for my music listening habits and financial data.