After 13 years, Google is coming back for patient health records. The tech giant has launched an early user feedback program aimed at exploring how patients might want to see, organize, and share their own medical record data.
The work could inform the creation of a consumer-facing medical records tool along the lines of Apple’s Health Records app. It also follows an early attempt by Google — later panned by medical experts — at creating a new version of the electronic medical record in 2008. This time around, timing may be on the company’s side: Its new effort, which is still in the early stages, came on the heels of the introduction of the federal information blocking rule, which lets patients access their medical records through health apps.
Google is currently recruiting about 300 patients for its health records study from community health facilities and academic medical centers in Northern California, Atlanta, and Chicago who use Epic as their medical record vendor. The study is only open to patients who use Android devices.
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