There is a great article on Power Your Practice: "Should Health Care Move To The Cloud?"
The answer should be Yes - But we need to do it carefully, making sure we retain control of our data and that it is housed securely in a robust and available environment.
If we want an effective Health Care System we need a system that is centered around the patient and not the hospital or physician, as it is today. When you focus on the patient you realize that they are not a static entity. Even when in Hospital they are often being moved around between different departments for different tests or procedures. Typically when a patient is receiving medical care they are not at home base. They are at a pharmacy, a doctor's office or a hospital. The device they have to hand is their phone and not their laptop or desktop machine - if they even have a computer at home.
Just as Steve Jobs envisioned iCloud to connect devices and make our data available where we are - whether on the web, our phone, a tablet or a laptop or desktop. The data is synchronized via the cloud. When we commission a new device the data we want is available and seamlessly synchronized with the cloud.
Google Health may be dead but the real power of the platform was not the user interface - the user interface basically sucked.
No, the real power of Google Health was as a data conduit. Indeed I changed pharmacies because CVS offered me the ability to automatically receive my prescription information in Google Health.
Yes, The fact that I could connect my Fitbit, my pharmacy, other health records and other wellness sites to Google Health was the real power of the platform. Now that role is basically left to Microsoft HealthVault unless one of the new breed of Personal Health Record platforms, such as NoMoreClipboard.com or one of the many listed at myPHR.com steps up but really HealthVault is the only game in town for connected health..
