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Google Health, the SaaS approach to Health Care records by Google Inc., received a boost today with the addition of CVS pharmacy to the list of pharmacies they support. I am a great sucker of online health records and, even though I was not greatly impressed, I had a neutral opinion about Google Health in its early stages. In fact, Zoli has covered both Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault here at Cloud Avenue and he was not at all impressed with them.

I don’t want to get into the politics of Healthcare here in this space. Irrespective of what side you are, it is easy to see the need to streamline access to healthcare records of patients. The best way to streamline the records is by taking them to Clouds. Now we are treading into a tricky situation. Of all things in people’s lives, the privacy of their health care records is very important. By moving into Clouds, we are entering into a slippery slope where both sides have valid arguments. So it is important to take the privacy issues into account while making this move. Even though I am a sucker of protecting our privacy, I don’t believe in putting the health records in a paper and then lock it in a fire-proof, natural disaster proof, xxxxx-proof safe in a heavily guarded building. I would prefer to have my records in a secure place with easy access. Plus, I want to control who sees the data rather than my physician or insurance company. SaaS based approach to solving this problem appears to be the best solution for me. Of course, I want this to be heavily regulated to protect the privacy of health care data of the patients. In short, I am convinced that a SaaS approach to health records, with proper regulations, is the correct approach in this Cloud Computing era.

Like Zoli, I am also unimpressed with the progress on the Health 2.0 front. Both Microsoft and Google are relatively quiet about their plans. But today’s announcement by Google offers some hope that we will eventually get there. The integration with CVS allows more than 100 million people in US to access their records through Google Health by importing your data from the pharmacy and also in managing the prescriptions through it. Though it is not a big leap, it is a solid tiny step towards Health 2.0 and towards helping to lower the health care costs.

We're working to solve this problem. With the recent addition of CVS/pharmacy to our network of pharmacy partners, more than 100 million people can now access their prescription history online and import it into a central, secure place — a Google Health Account. In addition to CVS, we're proud to be working with several other well-known national and regional pharmacy chains to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors, and increase efficiencies in health care.

I would definitely like to talk to both the Google Health team and Microsoft Healthvault team. If anyone from these team are reading this blog, please get in touch with me.