Medical Mouse Practice

(2 of 2)

The IT team has addressed the thorniest issues in EHRs--patient privacy--with an abundance of caution. In addition to standard confidentiality safeguards, the hospital opens an ongoing e-mail dialogue with patients to give them full disclosure about exactly who has accessed their data. "Some people complain we communicate too often," Lemon says.

Their work has won the Cleveland Clinic team a feather that any techie would covet in his cap--the attention of Internet giant Google. Cleveland Clinic was one of the search engine's early partners in Google Health, an online EHR service that was launched on May 19. For the hospital, it's an opportunity to expand patients' access to records. "We could only get so big on our own," says Joe Turk, a Web developer and the director of new products on the Cleveland Clinic technology team. "Google Health lets us go national."

Google Health is a universal version of Cleveland Clinic's MyChart. Instead of collecting the information from just one hospital, Google Health serves as an online clearinghouse for patient information. Once you've signed up for an account, which closely resembles Google's Gmail, you can grant permission for doctors, pharmacies or insurers to upload any pertinent data, thus creating a single destination for your whole health history that you can access from anywhere in the world. "Because a lot of medical information is not digital, it's not being put to good use," says Marissa Mayer, Google's senior VP for search and user products. "We want to define a standard that makes it more portable and available to people."

In February, Cleveland Clinic and Google began a six-week pilot project of Google Health. Of the 15,000 Cleveland Clinic patients asked to participate, about 1,500 MyChart users signed up. Mayer described the test cases as "beautiful." They helped Google identify early adopters for Google Health--snowbird seniors who spend their time in different homes during the year, for instance.

But if the U.S. is serious about improving health care and reining in costs, the rest of the industry is going to have to get on board too. There are a number of Internet powers trying to stake out the EHR space, among them Microsoft and Revolution Health Group, led by AOL co-founder Steve Case. In Cleveland, Google has a partner that is already ahead of the curve.