Google Goes to the Doc's Office

The search giant's pilot program with the Cleveland Clinic is aimed at giving patients and doctors better access to electronic medical records

by John Carey and Catherine Holahan

The U.S. health-care system is the most costly in the world. Yet it's also remarkably antiquated. The medical records of as many as 90% of patients are hidden away in old-fashioned filing cabinets in doctors' offices. Prescriptions are scribbled on paper. Most Americans need to fill out separate medical histories for each specialist they visit. "We are trained, like Pavlov's dogs, to repeat the same information 17 times," says Scott Wallace, chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology, a not-for-profit alliance of health care providers, information technology vendors, and health and technology associations. The result: mistakes, duplicated tests, botched diagnoses, and billions of dollars in unnecessary costs and lost productivity.

Many providers, including Kaiser Permanente and Cleveland Clinic, have invested millions of dollars in information technology systems and creating electronic medical records for patients. Here's the rub: Much of that information can't be shared from one doctor or hospital to the next. As a result, blood-test results in the database of an Arizona doctor, for instance, are of little use when the patient is visiting a doctor halfway across the country. Linking systems "is the real challenge in this industry," says Dr. C. Martin Harris, chief information officer at the Cleveland Clinic.

Pilot Project Kicks Off

In an effort to meet that challenge, the Cleveland Clinic and Google (GOOG) on Feb. 21 announced a project to give patients and doctors better access to electronic medical records. "It is clear that one of the big needs is assembling health records from a variety of places and giving people control of those records," explains Marissa Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google. And while the Cleveland/Google project may revolutionize medical record-keeping and improve how hospitals and physicians provide care, it also raises concerns over patient privacy and the security of sensitive information.

Here's how the pilot project, officially begun on Feb. 18, works. The Cleveland Clinic already keeps electronic records for all its patients. The system has built-in smarts, so that it will alert doctors about possible drug interactions or when it's time for, say, the next mammogram. In addition, 120,000 patients have signed up for a service called eCleveland Clinic MyChart, which lets patients access their own information on a secure Web site and electronically renew prescriptions and make appointments.

The system has dramatically cut the number of routine calls to the doctor and boosted productivity, though it has yet to effectively deal with information from an outside physician, Harris says. Those records are typically still on paper, and have to be laboriously added to the Cleveland Clinic system. It is a big problem, especially for the clinic's many patients who spend winters in Florida or Arizona, where they see other doctors.

Adding Google's technology lets patients jump from their MyChart page to a Google account. Once on Google, they'll see the relevant health plans and doctors that also keep electronic medical records. That means the patient can choose to share information between, say, the Arizona doctor and the Cleveland Clinic.

The system is still fairly primitive compared with sophisticated electronic information-sharing systems such as an ATM network. The information being shared is limited to data on allergies, medications, and lab results. That's because this data is more easily put in a standard form that can be read by different computer systems.

Paring Health-Care Costs

For the health-care system as a whole, though, it's an important move forward.