Google Wave and PHR

In this Sunday’s HUH? news we have a report by Healthcare IT news that Google may be considering using their Google Wave technology for EHR. Of course, I think the writer at Healthcare IT news must have had a deadline or something since the paper written by Google engineers Shirley Gaw and Umesh Shankar about representing “Individual Health Records” that are aggregating from “multiple sources” which sounds a lot more like a PHR to me than an EHR

That minor verbiage aside, it’s hard for me to imagine Google Wave used as a PHR or an EHR. Ok, I get the idea that it would be interesting to see all the clinical data elements added to a patients history in real time (basically what Google Wave does). This is an innovation that is needed. I just think that re-architecting the very consumer focused Google Wave product isn’t going to get us there.

Not to mention, Google has chosen to stop supporting Google Wave. I think Google probably has enough to do with health with Google Health. I’ll be very surprised if we really see the Google Wave technology used in healthcare.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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