Health records with a social element
Sounds like a great idea. Status updates would be colourful to say the least. Who wouldn't want all their friends commenting on their latest illnesses and afflictions?
Google is killing its Health and PowerMeter products due to a lack of interest from would-be customers. The Mountain View Chocolate Factory said that the two projects "didn't catch on the way we would have hoped". As a result, Google Health's life support will be switched off on 1 January 2012, with the data being available …
Well colour me astonished. After all, why wouldn't I want to trust everyday details of my private life to some company that will store it oversees where I have no recourse in case of trouble, and no guarantee of proper privacy ?
Really, I can't imagine why the masses didn't flock to this unique opportunity to be profiled in a very, very intimate way in exchange for the pleasure of perusing one's own life online (and maybe someone else's life if the proper hack gets known).
Someone already got "social disease". (It's a euphemism for pubic health care.)
Google have had the brightly stupid idea a few times re health of detecting the spread of a disease by how often it's googled for and trumpeting the achievement, although (1) this means that such diseases are now transmissible by Fox News [*] and (2) anyone who stops panicking for a moment about their cough/itch/sweat/whatever realises that they're only going to get Wikipedia anyway, and can go straight there.
[*] Negro Administration Depressive Syndome, for instance.
does indeed seem broken.
I've told them via
https://groups.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=groups_feedback
serveral times, but they havn't responded
I use GG rather than Pan 'cos I travel a great deal & use loadsa computers. I wonder if a 4-day hiatus in Google docs would go unfixed?
Google Health sounds like a nice tidy encapsulation of one's medical records, which you can share with one's health insurance _company_ to lessen one's medical expenses.
It sounds crazy from an Antipodean viewpoint, because we have a decent public health system that does the rebating almost automatically. Why would we need it? Ditto with the UK. When you've got the NHS, how does Google Health make your life better?