GHealth

At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:

* What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms
* Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her
* Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred

More.

As we generate more and more data in healthcare, the challenge is keeping it all organized and accessible. I often think as I'm trying to jog the memory of an older patient at 2 AM for their medication list in the Emergency Room, there really needs to be a better way to organize and keep folks healthcare information. As another example, I know someone that ended up going to three different hospitals, and three different abdominal CT's for abdominal pain. The fascinating thing, is that even though they were done within a month of each other, there were three different diagnoses! If only someone had access to all the films, the accuracy of the diagnosis could be improved. As we focus on patient safety, and reducing healthcare costs, this is an idea whose time has arrived. I welcome Google to taking on this challenge!

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