I’ve been following the Google Health announcements for quite a while now and today Google Health finally went live.

It’s been a long time coming and so it will be interesting to finally take a look under the hood. I haven’t personally had enough time to do a full analysis of Google Health myself, but techcrunch posted the announcement live and an initial review.

I think that techcrunch summed up a major part of Google Health and its meaning for EHR software in the following:

Google is planning to open up APIs to Google health to make it easy for other partners to tap into its health platform. And make no mistake about it. That is what this is: a platform. Health apps anyone?

Sure does make for some interesting thinking about how an EMR or EHR could integrate with Google Health. Depending on how my next couple days go, I may see if Google Health has given any sort of specifications for importing a patient record into Google Health from an EMR or EHR software program. In my previous posts it was said to use some form of CCR to integrate Google Health with EMR and EHR software. I hope this is the case. If it is, I think I’ll try to be the first to integrate Google Health with my EMR. I don’t think most of it would be that difficult.

Recently I’ve been reading a fair amount about the movement that many are calling Health 2.0. I think the most simple description of Health 2.0 is applying many of the Web 2.0 concepts to health care. My question is whether EMR fits into Health 2.0. My personal feeling is that most of them don’t. Most Web 2.0 projects are consumer facing projects that allow people to interact, collaborate and participate in the process. EMR software is more about facilitating a doctor’s charting.

Certainly you could make a good case that a patient portal or EHR is more Health 2.0. In fact, that really seems to cut to the heart of Health 2.0. Creating a powerful interface between doctors and patients so that patients are a part of the process. However, I think that most EMR in their current state don’t benefit from this type of interaction.

Of course, this begs the question of whether an EMR should have this type of interaction. My short answer is that it should, but until the payment systems catch up with the technology that creates these interactions we won’t see broad Health 2.0 application to EMR software.

I’ve been looking through my statistics lately (which I actually do most days) and it seems like most people aren’t searching for EMR anymore. It seems like there is a shift going on in people’s minds that they are now starting to search for EHR as opposed to EMR. There’s a whole discussion on wikipedia about whether the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Electronic Health Record (EHR) articles should be merged.

In my book they are pretty much the same in most people’s minds. Sure, some people like to argue that EHR has features that reach out to patients and allow patients to enter medical data, but most EMRs have those type of features anyway. I prefer to look at it as an EMR with a patient portal. However, the in thing to do seems to be to call a company’s EMR an EHR. The fact is that most people that have an EMR have a number of patient facing portions of their EMR. Does that make them all an EHR?

Regardless, I’m just wondering if one day I’m going to need to rename my blog to EHR and HIPAA. I’ve kind of grown fond of EMR and HIPAA, but I’m definitely not oblivious to the fact that people are starting to seach for EHR and not EMR. Renaming my blog might be a great thing to help with getting better google searches on the subject. Yes, I do enjoy having a lot of traffic to my blog. It makes me happy to think that people read my stuff and that I’m participating in at least some small way to shape the evolution of EMRs EHRs.