Vince Kuraitis has posted A First Comparison of Google Health and MS HealthVault perfectly summed up by the following table from his post:

Miquel A. Mayer MD PhD, director of Certified Medical Web Site Seal from Medical Association of Barcelona have invited me to join and collaborate in a research project directed by himself and funded by Spanish Health Minister:

Title
Drawing up practical guidelines for a responsible use of the information obtained on the Internet and the e-mail with health purposes

Summary
Nowadays, citizens are increasingly using the Internet to access healthcare information. The quality and features of health related websites on the Net is very variable, and this is why different national and European institutions have proposed accreditation initiatives and quality seals but there are no practical guidelines addressed to consumers to help them to use this information in the best way this and the e-mail for health purposes. The goals of this research project are: (1) To know the features of the health related content Spanish websites. (2) To analyse the different national and international quality websites initiatives and guidelines, legal and web accessibility using the Internet. (3) Based on the previous objectives, to draw up a practical guideline for Internet users (general public and patients) to contribute to both a responsible use of health information and better communication with medical doctors of the National Health Service. The methodology will be based firstly on a web based observational study of the Spanish websites with relevant health information using search engines and main health topics. At the same time an analysis of the European, national and international recommendations will be held adding any legal and web accessibility issues and finally to draw up, based on the analysis of the information obtained, a complete set of practical guideline for Internet users.

This work perfectly fix with my currently main task: my dissertation tentatively titled “Society, Health and the Internet: an empirical analysis of the Internet health uses in Catalonia”. One of the chapter of my dissertation will be based on the presentation at York. As I posted a few months ago, between October 2005 and January 2006, all the URLs classified in the Google directory of “Medicine and Health” (1,240 URLs) were identified. URLs were used as unique identifiers of web pages. Those URLs which did not find any web page together with the URLs which identified a document format like .pdf or .doc and those web pages under construction were excluded from the analysis. To sum up, 1,045 web pages were studied following a static snapshot analysis and manual classification (Bauer & Scharl, 2000).

The existence of authors and their affiliation in the content and the date of publication were selected as items to approach the quality of the health content identified. The existence of any terms of use in the web pages was considered as an item to approach the quality of the communication and services provided by the Internet. To sum up, the existence of any tools for rating the quality of the health content on the Internet was selected as general quality criteria.

In a few days I will update my references about this issues and share them through my on line references manager. Any suggestion or reference will be very welcome. Finally, I really would like to thank Miquel Ángel for his invitation to join this research project.

Most of the surveys about health and Internet reveal that Internet users seek health information using search engines. Well sometimes I have finished my posts about this issue saying further research is needed so I would like to share some scientific research, I have been reading, published by BMJ and done by Tang, H.; Ng, J.H.K. Googling for a diagnosis—use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based study.

Objective To determine how often searching with Google (the most popular search engine on the world wide web) leads doctors to the correct diagnosis. Design Internet based study using Google to search for diagnoses; researchers were blind to the correct diagnoses. Setting One year’s (2005) diagnostic cases published in the case records of the New England Journal of Medicine. Cases 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine; management cases were excluded. Main outcome measure Percentage of correct diagnoses from Google searches (compared with the diagnoses as published in the New England Journal of Medicine). Results Google searches revealed the correct diagnosis in 15 (58%, 95% confidence interval 38% to 77%) cases. Conclusion As internet access becomes more readily available in outpatient clinics and hospital wards, the web is rapidly becoming an important clinical tool for doctors. The use of web based searching may help doctors to diagnose difficult cases.

I also recommend the reading of the related articles and the discussion at BMJ. Those researchers help us to a better understand of how people use technology. This should be the first step to analyse the social consequences of Health and the Internet in the Network Society.

Take a look at this graphic. It looks like Google is taking the pulse of Health, doesn’t it?

Thanks to Genis Roca. I always learn something when I talk with him or when I read his wonderful blog.

If you are interested in Google PHR you should read Vince Kuraitis post titled “Connecting the Dots…Google Health Promises to Create AND Dominate Next Generation PHRs” and the discussion it has been generated. Congratulations for such a wonderful post and comments. After the first reactions on Google’s announcement, it is nice to see some analytical post about this issue.

Via this post I have found some useful bibliography from Project Health Design about Personal Health Records and User-centered Design and Human Computer Interaction.

Since Google has started to talk about Health I have been posting about its consequences because most of the surveys show us that people use this tool to seek health information.

One of the last post in Official Google Blog talk about Is there any doctor in the family? and it was written by a full-time primary care doctor who is now working in Google. I think if more health information is available more support will be needed and probably the patients - doctors relationship will be transformed. That means the transformation of information flow will affect the communication process.

Here goes some post I have read about the consequences of the change in the information and communication processes.

Jeff O’Connor has posted several times about Google initiatives on Health. I think his point of view is so interesting as far as he explains us how Google works and what are the consequences of using this tool in health and also talk about ethics.

Vince Kuraitis goes further and tackles the complexity of Personal Health Records and Google.

The debate is open. Privacy, confidential, ethical questions, complexity of manage clinical information, access and use of information,… are just some of the issues we will have to manage. Google is not just a tool!

BBC News has published this headline Google ranked ‘worst’ on privacy talking about a recent report launched by Privacy International. I haven’t read the report yet and I hadn’t heard before about this organization. But at least it makes me think again about the complexity of putting together health and Google as privacy is a key issue in healthcare field.

The Health Wisdom Blog has posted Why Web 2.0 Matters to Health Companies. The post includes some key issues about Health Care values and Web 2.0 values:

To summarize the figure I would say there are many tensions among the relationshiop of production and relationship of consumption of information in the Internet. Google could take advantage of these tensions because his job is putting together the demand of information (search) with the supply (search results) but in this process I think Google will not guarantee the values of Healthcare.

I am glad to notice that many bloggers have started talking about the implications of Google in healthcare. David Rothman has post about Google vs. PubMed linking with another interesting blog called Open Medicine Blog. Those kind of posts support the hyphothesis about the social, economics and political implications of search engines as technological artefacs.

As far as we can understand how those artefacts work we can analyze their impact over all the agents and organizations of healthcare systems. “Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engine Matters” an article written by Introna and Niseenbaum was one of the first reading I made that tackle this issue. I wonder if there are any papers talking about “Why the Politics of Search Engine in healthcare Matters”. Of course any suggestion will be welcomed.

Adam Bosworth has posted about his speech at the 2007 American Medical Association of Informatics (AMIA) Spring Congress talking about Putting health into the patient’s hands. I do not have any doubt about Google’s capacity to innovate in healthcare field. But probably because in most countries in Europe we have a welfare state model who allow us to have some rights related to healthcare system I wonder who is going to get most of the benefit of those applications as far as the market mechanism does not work well with public good as Health.

You can take a look of what could happen at Jonathan Zittrain’s blog

John Sharp has written about the Official Google Blog talking about Getting the Best Care. I have posted about the politics implications of search engines and health information seekers thinking about if “Should we consider ways of addressing the politics of Health Information on the Net as far as Health market mechanism does not work acceptable?”.

Jonathan Zittrain has posted The revolution will not be advertised talking about Google will eat itself. A very good example about the market mechanism does not work acceptable.

So I do not think that Google could lead the process to “do better”.