Google's Ubiquity Extends to Medical Devices

 NEWS TRENDS

A typical Google search yields thousands (or millions) of pages of information from all regions of the Internet. Thanks to a new partnership with IBM, patients may be the next location from which the Web giant culls data. 

Google has unveiled a program that allows users of the site Google Health to connect to medical devices. IBM and Google demonstrated the project's potential late last year with Wi-Fi radios attached to heart-rate monitors, scales, and other measurement devices. The radios enabled communication between the medical devices and a PC, which can serve as a conduit for real-time medical information.

“Our partnership with IBM will help both providers and users gain access to their device data in a highly simplified and automated fashion,” said Sameer Samat, director of Google Health, in a statement. “IBM has taken an important step in providing software that enables device manufacturers and hospitals to easily upload recorded data into a PHR [personal health record] platform, such as Google Health.”

IBM software enables data from personal medical devices, such as those used to monitor glucose levels and blood pressure, to stream directly into a patient's Google Health account or other personal health record. From there, the data can be shared with physicians if the patient chooses to do so. 

“The underlying sensor event platform [in the software] has been used in many different industries,” says Don Ness, manager of alliances for IBM's healthcare and life sciences division. “This platform streams in data from devices, aggregates them, and can perform complex event processing on them. An example would be the track-and-trace RFID [technology] for pharmaceutical companies,” he says.

The software “harnesses the rapidly growing use of remote patient monitoring across every part of the healthcare services industry,” according to Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's healthcare and life sciences division. IBM is also advocating for common standards that will allow medical devices and digitized health records to interact among products from different vendors.

Google Health users can already store and organize information about their medical history, but the partnership underscores the growing push for smart healthcare nationwide. Such a healthcare model could gather complex data in electronic patient records and use it for prevention and treatment.

IBM has long advocated a digitized and centrally stored database of patient records. Tech-savvy critics also lament the absence of a unified medical records system that follow a patient regardless of location. Roadblocks for these advances include funding, privacy, and liability concerns.

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