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It might be a good idea for physicians and the healthcare industry overall to start paying attention to what's happening with Google.
Why? Because the search engine giant and arguably the biggest force in IT today (sorry Bill/Microsoft) is also rapidly becoming the 800 pound giant of health IT. So what affects Google will, at some point, have an impact on healthcare and its practitioners.
That's not the stretch it might seem. Follow me here (and read the upcoming story on Google and search in GHIT).
The driver for all things health should be the patient/consumer. That's supposed to be the case today and, with all the talk about patient safety and the quality of healthcare, on the surface it does appear to be. In reality, however, the focus for what's happening now is the physician and the hospital and the insurance provider. The patient is a passive component.
But that's changing. As the Web has matured and people have become more at ease with using it to find information on all sorts of things, they've also discovered it's a good source of health information. Now, there's a good number of people who go to the Web regularly to find out about treatments and medicines.
In the future -- say, five years from now? -- it will be a common thing for patients to go to the Web to find information about their situations and then email back-and-forth with their physicians about potential treatments. It may even be the case that the majority of physicians' consulting will be done online.
Even more disruptively, potential patients will regularly go online to check out comparisons for how highly physicians and hospitals are rated for general care or specific treatments, and will take their pocketbooks to whoever comes up high on the list. Just as the banking industry and car dealers have, healthcare will become captive to consumer choice.
Searching the Web has also become a common activity for physicians. Despite all the talk about how many of them still haven't embraced technology in their practices, try and find one that isn't online about something at least once a day.
The focus for all of this is online search. It may not seem like it, because that facility may be buried in an application or service that will not seem to have much to do with search. But it's there, somewhere.
And Google is at the core of most of this. It's the engine that most people have there on their desktop, it's the one most of them naturally go to when they want to make a search. It's the easiest and most convenient doorway into the Web.
It's not for nothing that "google" is now a verb.
So, as I say, keep an eye on Google and all of the takeovers/lawsuits/intelluctual property spats and other shenanigans it's involved with. If you are at all interested in healthcare and IT, know that where Google goes so go you.
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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