Cuban conference on Health Informatics

The theme of the International Congress on Health Informatics in Havana is "health information and communication technology, a reality today, an opportunity for the future."

The program is divided into the following topic areas: computing, society and health; knowledge management, education and health information; new information technologies and clinical practice; Internet, networks and telemedicine; and Information and nursing procedures.

The papers are all on line (bravo), and I did searches of the titles looking for the words Internet, red, and Alba. Four papers have the word red in the title, two have the word Internet and none have the word Alba.

It is a pity that Cuban medical professionals do not have easy access to colleagues and information around the world and vice versa. As I've stated earlier, health care, education and research should be high-priority candidates for high speed connectivity to the undersea cable. The opportunity for the future is great; today's reality is not.

Making U.S. community health data accessible and useful

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist

Today the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are hosting an event called The Community Health Data Forum to highlight the power of transparency in health care. I was pleased to offer one of several technology demonstrations highlighting how health data can help us make better health decisions.

HHS has published useful data about communities, hospitals and nursing homes and made it available for download. As a demonstration project, we combined some of this information using Google Fusion Tables, a database service in the cloud that makes it easy to explore, visualize and share structured data. Using Fusion Tables we created a customized map to display information from the database. For example, you can see a map of "heart friendly" and "people friendly" hospitals, based on statistics from HHS:



It's important to note that the science behind measuring the quality of hospitals and health care in general is still evolving, so we can't make definitive conclusions from this data. However, this kind of transparency will lead to discussion, questions, and analysis which we hope will improve choices and outcomes. We encourage you to explore the new data from HHS, including visualizations like the one above, using our published table.

Powerful IT for disaster relief

Posted by Jen Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer

When disaster strikes in the form of a hurricane, earthquake, famine or flood, information technology can play a crucial role in coordinating a local or global response. Earlier this month, Google hosted over 20 international humanitarian organizations in our Washington, D.C. office for a day of workshops to raise awareness and share experiences about how Google's geographic and data visualization technologies, such as Google Map Maker and the Google Data Visualization API, can aid relief efforts.

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate kicked off the day's discussions with a talk about how agencies can leverage citizen-generated data and imagery to better coordinate response efforts, such as video from people using handheld cameras in the midst of a hurricane. He also cited Google Flu Trends as an example of how to glean public health insights from the wisdom of crowds.

After Craig spoke, the American Red Cross, World Bank and Plan International gave presentations on their own experiences using geographic and data visualization technologies in the field. American Red Cross, for example, is using Google Maps to display open shelters (left) and building damage assessments (right) on the map:

Several Google team members then led discussions and presentations on the myriad Google tools at the disposal of relief agencies: Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Map Maker and the Map Maker Data Download program for Africa, Google Labs Fusion Tables, the Google Data Visualization API and more. See, for example, how UNOSAT used Google Map Maker to aid flood relief efforts in West Africa by clearly mapping transport networks (for more examples of Map Maker in action, see here).

Below are a few photos from the event. Our next workshop, hosted in partnership with the United Nations in New York, will be held in November. If you're interested in more details, give us a shout on Twitter (we're @googlepubpolicy).

Google endorses Declaration of Health Data Rights

Posted by Roni Zeiger, M.D., Product Manager, Google Health and Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager, Google Health

From its inception Google Health has been about giving patients control over their medical data. For starters, that means we help people access their health information, give them a safe and secure place to store it, and let them share it with others if they wish. Over time our goal is to help consumers play a larger role in their own healthcare by empowering them with the information they need to make better healthcare decisions.

As part of this effort, we're endorsing an industry-wide Declaration of Health Data Rights. Unveiled today at HealthDataRights.org, the Declaration aligns with the principles behind Google Health: consumer empowerment, privacy protection, and data portability. We've joined a diverse group of stakeholders -- including doctors, researchers, technology companies, writers, entrepreneurs, health economists, and others -- that have come together to support this effort to promote greater patient access to personal health data.

While most of the rights outlined in the Declaration are already included in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), there are still practical challenges to acting on these rights. For example, getting access to your medical records today often requires that you fill out a form at your doctor's office, pay a $35 copying fee, and then wait a month or more to receive your records in the mail. Under the law, this is your data, and we believe you should have it the day you visit your doctor.

We hope the Declaration will help raise public awareness about the rights already protected under HIPAA and also help drive the public debate towards increasing patient access and control over their own health data. Strong health data rights will help patients collaborate with their doctors in order to get better care and avoid medical errors.

Endorsing a path towards a "meaningful use" definition

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Engineering, and Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager

After weeks of collaboration with a diverse group of organizations, today Google endorsed the Markle Foundation's framework on Meaningful Use and Certification. The framework outlines criteria for hospitals and physicians wishing to qualify for the health IT-related federal stimulus funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Among other things, the ARRA allows providers to qualify for health IT funding if they demonstrate that they are making a "meaningful use" of information technology. We think it's critically important that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers patient access to their digitized medical records via electronic health records (EHRs) when considering how to define "meaningful use."

Though Google Health will not directly receive stimulus funding (we are not asking for any), we see the framework as a critical step for moving the healthcare industry towards solutions that we believe will improve patient care. Simply put, we'd like to see the movement from paper-based medical records to digital records achieve its vast potential. Patient access to digitized medical records via EHRs helps people prevent illness, manage their health-related information and transactions, coordinate care and communicate with clinicians, understand health care costs, and take better care of loved ones.

As a provider of Google Health, a personal health record (PHR) service, we also believe it is very important that consumers have choice and ownership of where and how they want to store their data. We support the concepts of data portability, so that you can take your data with you no matter what hospital or delivery network you're being treated in, as well as healthcare data interoperability, so that you can transfer your information among multiple systems.

This isn't the first time we've supported a Markle Foundation framework -- in June 2008 we endorsed the Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information, which proposed a set of important privacy principles for personal health records (PHRs), and we've since adopted these concepts within Google Health.

Improving the United States' healthcare system is a complex topic with many interlocking components. The system’s size and complexity as well as the inherent challenges in the fields of medicine and public health make this a major undertaking. This framework's effort to improve consumer access to online data is an important step, and it builds upon Markle's previous work.