The Internet and Google in Today's Healthcare Industry

Google in Healthcare

In today's technology driven society, the internet is changing the way we do things in everyday life as well as in business.
The Health care industry is no exception. Actually it is far from it, since information is the key to be successful. Whether you are a provider, practitioner, patient or industry employee, to have your facts straight is in your best interest.

Information is easier accessible to more people today than ever before in the history of humankind.

If you have access to the internet, you have virtually instant access to many Petabytes (What's this..?) of information literally right at your fingertips. All you need is a browser like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox and a search engine.


When we talk about search engines, of course one name stands out:

GOOGLE!

Google has championed the search engine game for close to 10 years now. No matter what you type into Google’s search box, most likely it will return thousands of hits somewhat relevant to your query.

For example, a quick search for "Sore Throat" returned 5,580,000 results.

According to Internet World Stats the internet is available to about 1.6 Billion people as of 2009. That’s close to a quarter of the world's population.

The Internet's user growth trend between the years 2000 and 2008 was at a staggering 342.2 %.

As a business, the question to have or not to have a presence on the Internet is reduced to a rhetorical one after reviewing these numbers.

Google strives to become the all-in-one internet solution.Besides the world's most powerful search engine,Google also offers plenty of very useful web-based applications which we will cover in a later article.

In C.Peter Waegemann's report "The Role of the Internet for Today's Healthcare",
Mr.Waegemann (Chief Executive Officer,Medical Records Institute,and Chairman,Healthcare Informatics Standards Board,American National Standards Institute) elaborates:

" One of the main problems with today's healthcare is that the practitioner does not have relevant patient information with which to make informed decisions.
This occurs in 22% to 38% of the time that a patient is seen.Not having relevant information relating to the patient's medical history is not mostly due to lost or misfiled medical records,but to the fact that patients are seen in different medical entities that do not necessarily share patient information.

In the US,a whole industry - that of the emergency departments - is thriving on the fact that there is no patient history available when a patient comes in."

Google is providing increasingly sophisticated web-based solutions to issues such as the aforementioned with more speed and frequency than any of the competition.
You can find an overview of Google’s Products at this link, and Google Apps here

With the ability to use those applications on virtually any device connected to the World Wide Web,they posses an advantage over traditionally system-side applications.

In the next article of this series we will focus on Google Applications and their various uses in today's Healthcare Industry.

References:

Waegemann
Internet World Stats