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Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search
& User Products

It's been a busy week for the Google Health team. Last week we
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/pilot-with-cleveland-clinic-for-health.html"
id="jw56" >announced our partnership and pilot with the
Cleveland Clinic. This week, the team has been at the href="http://www.himssconference.org/"
id="nka:" >HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems
Society) conference in Orlando, Florida, where Eric Schmidt gave
the closing keynote. Eric's keynote marks the first time
we've talked publicly about the product we've been
designing and building. His talk also offered a deeper view into
our overall health strategy. ( href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTZKNcx9sBA" >Watch the
video.)

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our
overall mission of organizing patient information and making it
accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will
be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical
records online.

For the healthcare industry, online personal health records (PHRs)
aren't a new idea and, in some cases, online PHRs already exist
for patients. Here's what we think sets Google Health
apart:

Privacy and Security -
Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data that will be
stored in Google Health, we need to conduct our health service with
the same privacy, security, and integrity users have come to expect
in all our services. Google Health will protect the privacy of your
health information by giving you complete control over your data.
We won't sell or share your data without your explicit
permission. Our privacy policy and practices have been developed in
thoughtful collaboration with experts from the

href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-advisory-group-on-health.html"
id="fdm7" >Google Health Advisory Council.

Platform - One of the
most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform
strategy. We're assembling a directory of third-party services
that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means
you'll be able to automatically import information such as your
doctors' records, your prescription history, and your test
results into Google Health in order to easily access and and
control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you
will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will
be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill
prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.

Portability - Our
Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you
will be able to have access and control over your health data from
anywhere. Through the Cleveland Clinic pilot, we have already found
great use-cases in which, for example, people spend 6 months of the
year in Ohio, and 6 months of the year in Florida or Arizona, and
will now be able to move their health data between their various
health providers seamlessly and with total control. Previously,
this would have required carrying paper records back and forth.
With Google Health, the user can simply import the data from each
medical facility and then choose to share it with the other
facilities. It's advances in data portability like this that we
think can really make a difference in the quality of healthcare.
The clearer and more comprehensive the information regarding your
health becomes, the better your care will be.

User focus - We
aren't doctors or healthcare experts, but one thing Google can
create is a clean, easy-to-use user experience that makes managing
your health information straightforward and easy. We're still
iterating and testing our user interface, but here is what the
welcome screen looks like:

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