May 26 2008

Google Health - Part 1

General, Google Health, Private Health Records

Now that Google Health is live I decided to give it a spin. As I said in a earlier post I don’t think much of these efforts but Google is a big name and maybe that alone will get PHR’s in the public eye. Well, its worth a try. I have used other PHR systems but I am going to approach this from scratch. I will try to keep track of my time and comment on the interface. I won’t do this all at once so it will be a number of posts. I will try to include screen grabs when I can .

Further, when I think I need data from other health organizations I will try to contact them and see if they want to join the party. Let’s see how deep the PHR rabbit hole really is!

So lets get started. I’ve decided to go right to medications. I am doing this because this is where my main concern is, drug interaction. I take a number of medications and I know that there is a risk because of the blood thinner that I take.

The first issue is, do you have the medications handy, or do you have a list that you keep with you. I have the latter, a list from my wallet.

Here’s the screen when your trying to pick out your medications.

Medication Capture Google Health

OK, if you don’t have this list you’re lost. The real disappointment came when I finished putting in all my medications. Then I went to the Drug Interaction section. When I went there I go zero results. So I went back and only then did I realize that I need to enter the drug dosage information. Why is this a separate step, in AllScript you don’t have this separated.

Medication Dosage - Google Health

So we have to go back and enter our dosage information. If you going to separate the two steps you need to inform users that all details are needed to get the interaction advice.

A small annoyance, there are an add and edit link for each medication. After trying the add button I realized it there if you take combinations of the same drug. How hard is it to explain this in plain English. I added a record and then had to delete it and “edit” it in the right place.

Medication Add or Edit - Google Health

This could be tough, but some medicines come in multiple doses and you may take a combination of two dosage levels. Maybe just label it as dosage 1, dosage 2.

OK, now I’ve entered all my medications. At this point I am ready to see the results of the Drug Interaction. I will cover this in Part 2. In the meantime I will talk to my pharmacy, Target, and see if they are going to work with Google Health. I know I have other medications that are not active that they have in their database. This should be interesting.

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2 Responses to “Google Health - Part 1”

  1. # Bob Taylor, D.O.on 26 May 2008 at 10:56 pm

    It seems unusual that Google would require dosage information prior to performing drug interaction checking. I was told at the recent HIMSS show that Google is using First DataBank as their drug knowledge base. First DataBank allows drug-allergy screening, drug-drug interaction screening, and duplicate therapy checking with just routed drug information (drug name + route) .

  2. # jglogauon 22 Jun 2008 at 10:42 am

    Bob:

    I think its the way they’ve implemented the data. Not the core data itself.

    Jordan

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