fm Business Insider :

Here’s the problem. Each and every piece of multi, multi-million dollar bloated piece of crap healthcare “electronic medical record” (sounds about as dated as electronic mail, doesn’t it?”), is simply a billing engine to communicate a medical diagnosis to insurance companies with the hopes of maximizing how much doctors are paid. Each diagnosis and procedure has these numerical codes. They are a ridiculously robust antiquated language, like the code written to power the Commodore 64. There are people who speak this language – the 100 or so medical billers who are holed up in the basement of every hospital. They are the people you never see when you visit the hospital, but they’re the ones speaking the language that maximizes how much your hospital gets from your insurance company.

And now Google wants you to have access to this coded language that you, nor your doctors, speak. The assumption is that this will empower consumers and drive advertising revenue to Google based on these medical codes. And then you log in to Google Health and see a language that’s impossible to interpret and, most of the time, simply inaccurate. But these are your medical records found in one of the highest ranking hospitals in America.

What good does having access to Commodore 64 language in today’s world of Amazon, Zipcar, Tumblr, and Facebook?

Of course, the equivalent of Google Translator could possibly be built, but then again, if not properly translated and you died because of an improper translation, who is responsible? Google? Your doctor? The hospital? The billing department?

Source:http://www.businessinsider.com/google-health-records-just-perpetuating-antiquated-technology-2009-4

The article was written by a doctor that has his own blog and republished on BusinessInsider.

I think the article could have been better summed up with this sentence.

"And when Google tries to do something good for health care, they’re squashed by an industry that has insulated itself so perfectly even from the threats of Google."