Google Bats Away Suggestion Of Ad Conflict With Google Health

A tangential question for Google, however -- one that has dogged the search giant since its Google Health offering was first made available in May 2008 -- is whether Google's search-based advertising platform creates a conflict with storing personal health data.

Speaking at the Mastermind Session at Everything Channel's Healthcare Summit in San Diego in November,Google Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector told health care CIOs, solution providers and other attendees that Google intended Google Health as an extension of the Google brand, and it was and would continue to be entirely separate from Google's main advertising platform.

Watchdog organizations have taken Google to task over that claim, however, with one, Consumer Watchdog, even accusing Google of trying to lobby Congress to allow it to sell medical records by loosening regulatory language in the stimulus bill.

"The medical technology portion of the economic stimulus bill does not sufficiently protect patient privacy, and recent amendments have made this situation worse," wrote Jerry Flanagan of Consumer Watchdog in a Jan. 27 open letter to Congress. "Medical privacy must be strengthened before the measure's final passage, rather than allowing corporate interests to take advantage of the larger bill's urgency." Flanagan in the letter states that, "Google is said to be lobbying hard ... to weaken the ban currently in the draft measure on the sale of our private medical records." While Consumer Watchdog did not cite specific evidence of Google pushing for softer restrictions, Google responded to the group's claims on its Public Policy Blog last week. "The claim -- based on no evidence whatsoever -- is 100 percent false and unfounded," wrote Pablo Chavez, Google's Senior Policy Counsel. "Google does not sell health data. In fact, one of our most steadfast privacy principles is that we don't sell our users' personal data, whether it's stored in Google Health, Gmail, or in any of our products. And from a policy perspective, we oppose the sale of medical information in the health care industry."

Google has partnered with IBM on softwareto make the flow of data between Google Health records and other medical devices easier. Hundreds of PHR programs currently exist, many of them specific to individual hospitals. Security concerns remain one of the biggest deterrents to wider adoption of PHRs and digital health records in general, as presently, electronic personal health records are not classified as related documents under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).