Google announced an initiative with the Clevland Clinic to put patients in charge of their own health care information. The purpose of this program is to give patients the ability to interact with multiple physicians, healthcare service providers, and pharmacies. The current system places a great burden on the patient to obtain and distribute his/her own medical records. The new program is not yet publicly available, but is offered to current Cleveland Clinic patients on an invitation-only basis for between 1,500 and 10,000 patients. The test program will not currently permit patients to take their information outside of the Cleveland Clinic, but will rather test the system’s integration with Google’s platform.

“Patients are more proactively managing their own healthcare information,” said C. Martin Harris, M.D., Chief Information Officer, Cleveland Clinic. “At Cleveland Clinic, we strive to participate in and help to advance the national dialogue around a more efficient and effective national healthcare system.

While I fully believe in empowering patients to be in charge of their own health care records and trust them with the information, the question is whether Google is trustworthy enough and what Google’s motives are. Although Google clearly has the computing and software development capacity to handle and search the information, one must wonder whether Google has proved its ability to maintain patients’ privacy. Furthermore, how will Google seek to profit from the service? Serving ads alongside patient records seems like a conflict of interest and may not generate many eyeballs since the information is not meant to be widely shared. Sitting around on a Friday night perusing my medical records is usually not my favorite pastime. And I don’t particularly want to see ads targeting drugs towards any medical condition Google determines that I may have.

This is not a new idea, and there are already competitors in the field, such as http://www.ihealthrecord.org/ where you can create a medical profile and store your health records online.