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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will announce its long-awaited online health service featuring “personal health records” today. A closer reading of that story, however — bolstered by a timely CNET piece — suggests that Google will simply preview its service at a healthcare-IT trade show now underway in Orlando.

A preview is better than nothing, of course. But if that’s all Google has planned today, it’s really not much of a launch. We unpack the WSJ coverage and survey the Google Health landscape over at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Well, the WSJ says so in this somewhat breathless report that states Google will announce its long-awaited personal health-record service today.

My first thought was that the announcement was timed to get Google on the record in advance of the Health2.0 “Spring Fling” conference in San Diego next week, which will feature lots of talk about the role of the Internet in improving healthcare. Another possibility is that Google is pulling a bait-and-switch similar to that of Navigenics, which last November “announced” its personal-genomics service but held off launching it until — well, until not yet.

Yet a third possibility — and the most likely one to me — is that, as this CNET article states, Google CEO will merely “preview” Google Health at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, supposedly the largest healthcare IT meeting in the world. Whatever it is, don’t hold your breath; the WSJ itself states that “[i]t wasn’t clear when the Google service for creating personal health records will begin to be available for consumers to access.”

In fact, the WSJ article doesn’t actually describe Google Health in any sort of detail, and instead is largely devoted to pointing out the major challenges facing personal health records, many of which will sound familiar to regular readers here. These include:

• Limited adoption of electronic medical-record systems. Only 14 percent of U.S. medical practices even use digital records, which will complicate the process of moving medical information to the Google system.
• Incompatible electronic medical-record systems at hospitals and doctors’ offices. Because existing digital-record systems use different data formats, systems like Google’s will have to be able to import most, if not all, of them, pushing up complexity and cost.
• Privacy. Third-party systems such as Google’s aren’t regulated by federal medical-privacy laws, giving providers plenty of freedom to, for instance, sell ads tailored to your medical profile. (Google told the WSJ that “trust between Google and our users is one of the absolute cornerstones of our business.”)

Unmentioned by the WSJ is another nagging question, which is the extent to which patients can “customize” their medical profile — which, when it comes down to it, means the ability to selectively share, edit or even delete information. As I’ve noted before, such customization could undermine the usefulness of health records to doctors, while limiting peoples’ freedom to edit them makes them a whole lot less “personal.”

To be sure, a preview by Schmidt is better than what we’ve seen so far — mostly screenshots of what appear to be leaked early prototypes of the Google Health site, plus a vague announcement of a Google Health pilot project in Cleveland. In fact, the CNET piece mentioned above actually delivers some of the goods, offering a brief description (but no screenshots) of the preview.

Among the intriguing new details: The service will allow customers to “customize” their health records, although CNET doesn’t say by how much; will be integrated with Google’s maps and email applications to allow people to more easily search for doctors and save their contact information; and will allow third-party widgets that work within the platform, such as one that might alert patients through Google’s calendar when it’s time for them to take medication.

It’s tempting to conclude that this steady drip-drip-drip of information is part of a master PR plan for generating maximum enthusiasm for the Google Health service. (If so, it’s working brilliantly.) As for the launch itself, I suspect we won’t be able to miss it when it actually happens. Accept no substitutes.

UPDATE: Google Health chief Marissa Mayer makes the official announcement in this blog post. The bottom line: A launch of Google Health is likely “in coming months,” but not now. There are some nifty screenshots, though — one of which we’ve basically seen before — but I’ve reproduced them both below for reference. (Click either for larger versions.)

The impending — or so it’s seemed — launch of Google Health has spurred any number of comparisons, invidious and otherwise, to Microsoft’s flashier but ultimately disappointing launch of HealthVault last October.

Now that Google has finally announced its first big health project with the Cleveland Clinic, though, it’s far from clear exactly how its platform is going to address nagging privacy issues and the fundamental question of how much control patients will have over their records. We unpack the Google Health announcement over at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

So Google Health has finally made its first formal announcement — not a splashy rollout along the lines of Microsoft’s HealthVault (see our coverage), but a limited — and closed to the public — testbed launched in partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.

Here’s what we know about the project: The Cleveland Clinic, which already has a sophisticated electronic medical-records system serving some 100,000 patients, will allow 1,500 to 10,000 of them to sync up their records with Google’s nascent Internet-based personal-health-records system. The main goal is to allow patients to take their medical records with them wherever they go. Many of the clinic’s patients spend as many as five months of the year elsewhere, particularly in Florida and Arizona, and the clinic’s chief information officer, C. Martin Harris, is casting the initiative as a way to eliminate the need for those patients to carry paper copies of their records with them.

Here’s what we don’t know: In the release, Google’s Marissa Mayer says that “we believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information,” but it isn’t really clear what “manage” means in this context. One of the primary questions hanging over the use of personal health records — a term that usually implies some degree of patient control over their record — is how useful they’ll actually be for doctors and other health professionals if patients are free to selectively share their medical information, or even edit or delete it.

In fact, it’s something of a paradox. If patients don’t have this sort of control over their records, they won’t exactly be “personal.” By contrast, if patients are able to exercise substantial discretion over how their information is shared, other doctors may not find much reason to trust them, particularly if people are taking the opportunity to hide or minimize embarrassing information. (The average episode of House can provide several examples — albeit exaggerated ones — of how even seriously ill people might choose to conceal vital information from their doctors, even to the point of actively misleading them.)

There are plenty of logistical issues to work out, too. The Cleveland Clinic may have a state-of-the-art medical-record system, but odds are good that many of the physicians these patients will see elsewhere don’t — so how will these doctors actually use this information? Sure, the patient can “empower” their doctors to view the information on the Web, and maybe that’s enough. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a lot of Arizona or Florida clinicians printing out the information and stuffing it back into paper folders, which would seem to undermine the whole point of the exercise.

Finally, of course, there are privacy concerns as well, as I’ve written about previously with respect to HealthVault. Google’s system apparently won’t be regulated by the medical-privacy provisions of the federal law known as HIPAA, at least according to this AP story.

In fact, the World Privacy Forum just released a report (PDF link) on the risks to patient privacy posed by “third party” health-record systems such as those Google, Microsoft and others are working on. The Cleveland pilot project looks pretty unlikely to actually answer those sorts of nagging questions, which suggests that Google is more interested in giving its technology a workout than in grappling with how personal health records might be used — and possibly abused — in practice.

The NYT’s Steve Lohr, who’s written some in-depth pieces on the subject, has more in this blog entry.

Trust the reliable folks over at Google Blogoscoped to unearth a login page for the long-awaited Google Health service before it actually launches. Neither the login nor any of the links on the page seem to work, but it’s another tantalizing glimpse at what Google may soon be unveiling.

It’s worth noting that Marissa Mayer, who took over the Google Health project after Adam Bosworth unceremoniously decamped to launch his own health-related startup, said last October that Google Health would be coming in early 2008. So the timing is certainly about right.

As for clues — well, the login page doesn’t offer too many. The blurb to the left of the screen (see screenshot below) promises online health profiles, the ability to download medical information from doctors and hospitals, personalized health advice, some sort of physician directory, connections to “time-saving services” and a sharing system so your family and caregivers have access to your medical information.

Microsoft’s HealthVault (see our coverage here and here) promised much the same thing — minus the doctor directory and personalized advice, at least — but initially was so bogged down in heavy-handed security and user-unfriendliness that I’ve heard scarcely a word about it since. (Plus, there are those nagging privacy questions.) Scads of Health 2.0 sites also offer various pieces of what Google appears to be promising, although to the best of my knowledge, no one has really put all these features together before.

Anyway, it will be fascinating to see how Google approaches many of the same issues that have bedeviled Microsoft and the many startups trying to slice off a piece of the Health 2.0 pie. With any luck, we won’t be waiting much longer. (Hat tip to bbgm, where Deepak Singh rightly wonders what personalized health guidance and “time-saving services” might actually mean.)

See also our previous coverage of a Google Health prototype (or so I assume), also featured on Blogoscoped, here.

The former head of Google’s health initiative, who resigned abruptly while on vacation last month, has finally resurfaced, according to his blog. It’s not exactly the first sighting of Bosworth since his departure from Google — I was told he turned up briefly at the Health 2.0 conference last month, although he apparently wasn’t saying much about what had happened — but it’s the most detailed update most of us have seen since he vanished.

Which is not to say that Bosworth is terribly forthcoming about his current plans. He’s starting a new company and writing prototype code of some sort, but doesn’t spill many details. If your idea of a newsworthy tidbit is the fact that he’s thinking of moving his blog to Wordpress, then this post might satisfy your news-junkie cravings. For the rest of us, not so much. Still, it’s clearly worth keeping an eye on Bosworth, whether or not his next venture has anything to do with online health.

(UPDATED: See below.)

No sooner does the NYT run a significant piece on health-info efforts at Google and Microsoft than someone decides to leak the “preview” of the site to Google Blogoscoped. (Site author Philipp Lenssen confirms that it wasn’t an authorized disclosure.)

Based on the ten screenshots available at Lenssen’s site, this preliminary version of Google Health is indeed laser-beam focused on creating a personal electronic health record — a digital version of the paper files your doctor probably keeps in one of those vertical filing cabinets. Given the unlikelihood that users will be able to simply upload their information from their doctor — as I seem to be repeating a lot these days, fully three-quarters of U.S. doctors still keep medical records on paper — the initial emphasis is on getting users to enter as much of their personal information as they feel comfortable providing.

To that end, the early version of Google Health offers the standard spare-but-clean Google interface. As you can see from this screenshot, the section is divided into “Profile” and “Medical Contacts” tabs. “Profile” is where you’d enter your medical details — everything from straightforward descriptive details (age, sex, height) to immunizations to current medications, surgeries, and family history. Presumably Google will refine some of these options over time — this screenshot (duplicated below) of the “Conditions and Symptoms” tab, for instance, offers choices such as “head and neck angioedema” and “head and neck carcinoma,” which ordinary people aren’t likely to understand unless they already have these conditions. (Angioedema is a fluid-based swelling of the skin and mucus membranes, while a carcinoma is a type of cancer.)

One of the cooler features hinted at in this preview is a customized “health guide” the site will put together once you’ve entered enough information. As the site text reads, “When you add some information to your profile, Google Health will search trusted medical sources and create a health guide targeted for you.” In other words, Google plans to offer some preliminary diagnoses for users who trust it with their medical details. This part of the site is currently built in collaboration with SafeMed, an automated-diagnosis startup that we covered briefly here. It will be interesting to see how medical authorities react to this sort of automated, personalized diagnosis, as it might skirt fairly close to the actual practice of medicine in some states. The preview site does urge users to “[b]e sure to discuss questions about your medical care with your doctor or medical provider before making changes.”

The remainder of the preview site is fairly straightforward so far as health information goes. The “Medical Contacts” page turns out to be a blank box that offers the option of searching the “Google Doctor Directory” to add your current physician or physicians. There’s no sign as to whether that directory actually exists or not, or whether it will be compiled with human oversight or automatically assembled in the fashion of other Google directories.

Overall, it seems a solid but unremarkable effort, one that probably wouldn’t even merit much attention were it not from Google. Of course, that makes all the difference, since a groundswell of patients who want their doctors to use Google medical records might actually encourage more doctors to adopt electronic systems.

In the meantime, for comparison, you might check out some other early efforts to do something similar, such as the OpenHealthRecord or the more sophisticated but less user-friendly HealthCapture PHR.

UPDATE: Tom Salemi of the In Vivo Blog has an even more dyspeptic take on both the NYT story and the Google Health preview — not to mention a decent joke based on one of my favorite bands — here.

UPDATE REDUX: Another underwhelming review is up at MedGadget, while at Over My Med Body!, Graham Walker — a third-year Stanford med student — rails that “Patients should not control their medical record,” and then explains why. The comments to Walker’s post further expand on the issue of just how good an idea it is to let people enter their own medical information, and whether that should complement doctor-provided information or even override it if the patient so chooses.

updated

Google has previewed a prototype of Google Health, a consumer-oriented health service dedicated to helping people track their health information online. (See Google Blogoscoped for screenshots, and useful descriptions of the service.)

This is a big deal.

Online health is emerging to become one of the internet’s major industries, and health-related start-ups are popping up and getting funded left and right. It was probably only a matter of time before Google and Microsoft woke up and started pushing their weight around. At VentureBeat LifeSciences, David Hamilton looks at the rivalry between Google and Microsoft, and how the biggest opportunity is in letting people manage their health records online. [Update: David has more here, writing after the Google Health previews were released.]

While health information now pervades the internet, the internet has yet to pervade the practice of health care. Medical records are strewn across thick folders or proprietary systems in doctors’ offices. The use, storage and deployment of medical information is clearly running on outdated systems, and Microsoft and Google would love to provide change this.

Google recently previewed Google Health, a service that aims to enable people to control their medical information and give access to anyone they choose. Something like this fits perfectly with Google’s strategy of “organizing the world’s information and making it accessible to everyone.” Of course, this “everyone” can include insurance companies and the Department of Homeland Security, who would love to have an easily navigable database of the populations’ health records, which might not be something people want.

They’ll probably have to get over it. The NYT’s Steve Lohr notes in his article on this subject, that “health care is a field where policy, regulation, and entrenched interests tend to slow the pace of change.” This is certainly true. Lohr also points out that “technology companies have a history of losing patience,” but we’d be willing to bet our houses that the big players are in it for the long haul: By 2015, health care spending is expected to reach $4 trillion, or 20 percent of the U.S.’ GDP, or a twofold increase from 2005. Any company with the resources to do so will happily stick around to get a piece of that.