Article By: Chris Thorman Market Analyst at Software Advice Article has been republished by request of the author.
Google’s Window Into The Healthcare IT Market
One of the major goals of the federal government’s push for nationwide electronic medical record (EMR) adoption is to create an information network where “health data can flow freely, privately, and securely to the places where they are needed.” So far, this is proving to be a challenge for the nation’s hospitals and doctors. Software Advice thinks that this problem presents an opportunity for Google to take a big step into the healthcare IT market in 2010, following other major companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and insurance giant Aetna. Through their Books project, Google has shown that they can scan, interpret and index a high volume of books in a relatively short amount of time. Unstructured medical records – those not neatly organized within an interoperable EMR system – could be managed in the same fashion. Google possesses many of the requisite skills and technologies to solve this problem. However, to be successful, Google will have to figure out these issues:
- How to gather structured and unstructured medical data on a large scale;
- How to share and make that data accessible (searchable) to people; and,
- How to comply with privacy regulations.
With Google Health rumored to be on the back burner, working with hospitals and medical providers to aggregate and organize medical data could be Google’s window into the growing market that is healthcare IT. Here’s how they can do it. Read the rest of this entry »
