The American and Australian scientists at STAR have received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to develop the cough-analyzing software for developing countries where access to health care is more limited than in first world nations. Despite the poor economic conditions of these under-developed countries, there are a plethora of mobile phones which are being used for everything from early warning systems to mobile payments to health alerts. An mobile app that diagnoses disease would fit right in.

The way the diagnostic software works is by comparing the sounds of the mobile user's cough to a database of coughs associated with all the different types of respiratory diseases. There would also be multiple coughs per disease stored in the database to take into account variations by age, gender, weight, and other factors.

While to our untrained ears, many coughs sound just alike, a tuned-in doctor - or in this case, a mobile app - can listen to the entire structure of a cough from the initial intake of air to the final 100-150 milliseconds of a cough that contains the distinctive "wet" or "dry" and "productive" or "unproductive" sounds that help to classify the cough's seriousness, explains an article on Discovery News. Even the loudness of a cough is taken into account - healthy people have coughs that are 2% louder than a sick person's.

At the moment, the software exists as a computer application but the scientists plan to have it re-written, when complete, as an application for mobile phones.

There's no word on when the mobile application will be released, but the scientists will need to collect around 1000 cough samples before the database is ready. If they're able to then design a successful analytical tool for mobile phones, the impacts to people's health would be far-reaching - and not just in developing countries, but everywhere in the world.

Today, Google has announced a new feature of Maps that will allow users to find flu vaccines near them. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Lung Associaltion, and Flu.gov, Google Maps is now helping users search for seasonal flu vaccination locations, H1N1 flu shots, or both together.

Now, Google has gathered information about locations of flu vaccine shots from 20 states in the U.S. Google is also collecting information from chain pharmacies and other vaccine providers in all 50 states. Currently, users can find vaccine shots available from retail chains such as Walgreen's, CVS, Kmart, and WinnDixie.

The application gives vaccine location hours, when available, and even lets users know when vaccine supplies have run out at a particular location. All in all, it's a useful tool for quickly and simply finding the nearest place to get a flu shot.

For more information on how Flu Trends works, check out this video from Google.org:

NetBase employs the same principals across a variety of enterprise tools, but healthBase is its first foray into consumer-facing products. While the company is used to powering corporate, federal and market research, healthBase allows NetBase to show off its content intelligence tool in a way that gives us insight into our selves and our bodies.

Because NetBase is not reliant on manual annotation or custom taxonomies, the system is also very scalable. It took roughly 2 days to produce all of the data in healthBase - a feat that would never be possible by a combination human and machine system.

"It's important for us to address real issues with semantic technologies outside of a lab," Says Tellefsen. To try healthBase visit healthbase.netbase.com

Practice Fusion currently has "over 18,000 users," which would appear to be a big increase on the 1,300 medical professionals they had one year ago. The product originally launched in November of 2007, so it's nearly two years old now.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Healthcare?

A post on the Practice Fusion blog today asks the question: is "cloud computing" right for health IT? We reported earlier this week that cloud computing is infiltrating virtually every corner of technology right now, but it still has dangers. We noted the recent hacking of Google Docs to steal internal Twitter documents, as one recent high profile example (high profile because the stolen documents were subsequently emailed to some news outlets, some of whom published the 'hot' docs).

However despite these risks Practice Fusion claims that the cost benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are significant, particularly in its EMR niche:

"Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT - especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems - and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption."

Security and safety is of course the big potentially negative issue with cloud computing. But Practice Fusion points to several use cases where it says that cloud computing has advantages over desktop apps: disaster-recovery, hacks (because "SaaS providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford"), and privacy. All of those points come down to the premise that a cloud computing / SaaS specialist, such as Practice Fusion, has more expertise, more resources, and is generally better able to deliver those safety and security requirements.

That all sounds great in theory, however every case like the Twitter stolen documents one serves to undermine that argument. And there are just too many such cases right now.

Nevertheless, we're sure that over time cloud computing will become ever more secure. It's clear that Practice Fusion is a young company that is growing well. With Salesforce.com on its side too now, the future looks secure for them.

With the N73 as the kernel, the team added a battery-powered LED lamp and a series of filters. The result is an extremely inexpensive portable microscope with the potential to detect malaria, sickle-cell anemia and tuberculosis from fluid smears.

Microscopy-based detection of malaria is possible by taking a pinprick from a patient, smearing their blood onto a treated glass slide, and examining it under a microscope. Malaria parasites are detectable when they react to the treatment on the glass (Giemsa stain). According to a New Scientist article published this morning, the modified phone or "CellScope" makes it possible for field doctors to test for the disease as well as send their images to labs via a wireless network.

If cell images are coupled with patient details and locations, the CellScope can help reduce disease-based death rates by guiding grassroots health workers in deploying resources, treating those affected and stopping the spread of disease across townships.

For more mobile phone based health solutions, check out NetSquared's list of projects.

In a recent and potentially devastating polio outbreak in Kenya, EpiSurveyor's new mobile platform was used to track virus carriers and immunize affected children. The campaign targeted around 2 million Kenyan children. Mobile tech will be used exclusively for new nationwide initiatives in children's healthcare, and the World Health Organization has made EpiSurveyor the standard for data collection in sub-Saharan Africa. Screenshots and video included below.

The EpiSurveyor program began using donated Palm Pilots to gather health data in Kenya and Zambia less than two years ago. Currently, DataDyne is migrating the program to Java-based platforms for mobile phones. Beta testing began in April 2009 with Nokia S40 series devices and will expand to support other devices in May.

There's an interesting and rather basic tutorial video for field workers here which demonstrates some of the uses of EpiSurveyor's data collection tools. Much more interesting is this video, an interview with an EpiSurveyor mobile developer in Kenya who had been working through the night to prepare a stack of phones for data collection in the field:

Interestingly, DataDyne's Coded in Country (CIC) initiative puts at least 50% of the coding duties in the hands of local developers, helping to bolster both local tech communities and local economies.

Since most developing areas have far greater saturation of mobile devices than of actual computers with Internet connections, these devices are of the utmost importance for collecting, storing, retrieving, and transmitting critical and even life-saving information.

Last year, EpiSurveyor training took place in nine countries (Benin, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda). This year, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Eritrea, Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Togo will also have training programs. Overall, more than 800 health officers throughout Africa will have been trained on the EpiSurveyor program with potential to reach over hundreds of thousands of patients throughout the continent.

Datadyne founder, pediatrician and CDC epidemiologist Dr. Joel Selanikio, also recently won this year's $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability for his contributions to public health and international development.

(Photo by Joel Selanikio/DataDyne.org.)

The new alliance wants to guide governments, NGOs, and mobile firms on how mobile technology can be used to help save lives.

Already, mobile technology is providing and augmenting healthcare initiatives throughout the world. In a recent study released by the UN and Vodafone titled, "mHealth for Development: The Opportunity of Mobile Technology for Healthcare in the Developing World," over 50 of these types of initiatives throughout 26 countries were discussed. The biggest adopters of mobile technology were India with 11 projects and South Africa and Uganda with 6 each.

• Sending mobile phone owners updates on diseases via SMS.
• Letting health workers in Uganda log data on mobile devices from the field.
• In South Africa, the SIMpill is a sensor-equipped pill bottle with a SIM card that informs doctors whether patients are taking their tuberculosis medicine.
• In Uganda, a multiple-choice quiz about HIV/AIDS was sent to 15,000 subscribers inviting them to answer questions and seek tests. Those who completed the quiz were given free airtime minutes. At the end of the quiz, a final SMS encouraged participants to go for voluntary testing. The number of people who did so increased from 1000 to 1400 over a 6-week period.
• In the Amazonas state of Brazil, health workers filled in surveys on their phones about the incidences of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
• In Mexico, a medical hotline called MedicallHome lets patients send medical questions via SMS.

The Power of Mobile Technology

But beyond just the altruistic aspects of mobile healthcare, the UN report also demonstrated to mobile operators how programs such as these could provide value to the industry. That, said UN/Vodafone Foundation Partnership head Claire Thwaites, was a crucial step since the industry, like many others today, stands at the edge of a downturn.

Because mobile technology is relatively cheap and easy to spread, it can connect the rural areas that desperately need healthcare with the large populations of doctors who live in the urban centers. For example, "in India," said Dan Warren, director of technology for the GSM Association, the umbrella organization that hosts the MWC, "there are 1m people that die each year purely because they can't get access to basic healthcare. The converse angle to that is that 80% of doctors live in cities, not serving the broader rural communities where 800 million people live."

Some Drawbacks

Using mobile technology is not a panacea for the world's health issues, though. Says Forrester analyst Elizabeth Boehm, one of the biggest issues with mobile healthcare is that "the people who are most in need of healthcare are usually more aged, so they don't use the mobile or they're not comfortable with it." This limits the use of mobile phones in public health information campaigns.

However, as the technology continues to spread throughout the world, it's easy to see how, over the course of time, phones could become a "doctor in your pocket" for the less fortunate citizens of our world.

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

The Continua Alliance, made up of companies like Nokia, Intel and Panasonic, along with IBM and Google, highlighted a handful of factors in the announcement. The technology will be useful in a wide variety of case types ("including chronic disease management, health and wellness, and elderly care"), in the US and around the world. By leveraging online services, the platform will enable healthcare providers to leverage scale in ways that otherwise isolated medical monitoring can not. And by putting the software into widespread use, the group hopes to make significant headway in supporting open standards and "interoperable healthcare products and solutions." That's on top of all the standard consumer benefits of online health records. (See coverage at Medgadget for more details and a link to the press release.) The companies don't yet have any name for the platform but say it's tested and ready to deploy.

The group also said that supporting the development of Google Health was one of its goals, but we hope that the technology will support the development of an entire ecosystem of complimentary, competing and interoperable health data services.

That kind of language is both similar to what advocates of social networking "data portability" use and represents the kind of steps we'd love to see more of from big vendors in all kinds of technology sectors.

Open, standardized data, backed up by certified security measures and serving as the foundation of a new era of innovation is a fantastic vision. If you think that big players in social networking have a financial interest in data lock-in, though, just imagine the resistance that "data portability" could face in the multi-trillion dollar medical industry.

The companies collaborating on this platform believe that consumer demand for informed care, combined with the vendor participation already gathered, will force the rest of the industry to open, down to every medical practitioner challenged by patients to use portable data in treatment. That seems like a sound strategy to us.

HopeLab, a nonprofit organization founded by Pam Omidyar, was named one of Fast Company magazine's 2009 Social Enterprises of the Year this month for its efforts in improving the health and quality of life of young people with chronic illness.

Re-Mission players pilot a nanobot named Roxxi as she travels through the bodies of cancer patients destroying cancer cells, battling bacterial infections and managing the side effects of cancer.

Re-Mission is available to young people with cancer free of charge. The game can be ordered or downloaded here.

As we shall see, the two tech rivals - Google and Microsoft - have much in common when it comes to their online health apps.

As with Google Health, Microsoft is essentially building a platform for other, smaller services to tap into. Neither bigco wants to get involved in the tricky world of health records compliance and prescription. Both are encouraging more specialized health-focused services to do that legwork - and Google and Microsoft will provide the tech infrastructure and focus on ordinary users.

Like Google, Microsoft is emphasizing that it's still early stages in this market. Said Keith Toussaint:

"We knew going in that introducing a new type of consumer health solution is a long-term endeavor; we have to be in this for the long haul. Health is, as you know, a HUGE ecosystem -- trillions of dollars, hundreds of millions of consumers/patients, hundreds of thousands of physicians, thousands of hospitals, hundreds of insurance plans and so on. We also knew the greatest value of HealthVault to consumers will come when we can offer connectivity throughout the health ecosystem and give people the ability to use their personal health information in a wide range of health and wellness applications and share it with the providers and plans of their choice. We're still in the early phases of developing the HealthVault ecosystem but we're making great progress."

Toussaint admitted they are essentially competing with Google "to find the best developers" for their HealthVault platform, but that "we're not in some kind of hot market share battle now because it's so early."

Indeed Toussaint used the comparison of Coke and Pepsi to illustrate their nascent competition with Google:

"Leading hospitals like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are actually integrating their systems with both us and Google -- because some people like one or the other. It's a Coke or Pepsi thing. And why not program with both? It's fine as far as we're concerned; this whole space is still so small, and has such huge potential, that we can both grow huge and succeed without bumping heads. Later on, head-to-head competition will probably be more important."

So it seems that it's difficult to 'taste the difference' between HealthVault and Google Health. They are both platforms, neither tries to be a healthcare provider or conduit between healthcare professionals and patients, and both have search as their business model. There are differences in the two services when you drill down, but at a high level they're very similar.

Let us know if you've used either system and if so what your experience has been.

Image credit: Senor Adventure

Integrate Your Stuff Here

Krasner cited MyCareTeam, a third party diabetes management application which she says is using Google Health to "to integrate their stuff into our repository for health records."

According to the press release in May about this integration, the MyCareTeam product allows users to transfer their glucose readings, lab values, medication, and other information from their software into their Google Health accounts. It is mostly a manual process, however Krasner pointed out that users can upload their data "automatically using LifeScan OneTouch meters". She admitted though that Google is "still in the very early stages, so these services are still growing and developing."

Online Health Constraints

The issue with moving health records online though is that there is a lot of rules and regulations to contend with. However Tenderich asked Krasner why Google isn't doing more, for example by offering a secure messaging system to allow patients to discuss their health issues with their doctors. Krasner's reply shows how this is too much of a red tape jungle for even the mighty Google to overcome:

"This goes back to the health records platform model. We're not in the business of offering secure messaging back and forth with doctors. What we're doing is giving people options to use great services that do offer that functionality.

For example, we integrate with web sites from the big retail pharmacy chains and provider sites like CVS, Walgreens and Quest Diagnostics labs. You can't order refills directly through Google Health, but you can import your prescription history, and you can send data back to the pharmacies via their sites."

So users have to leave the Google Health site when they need to make a medical transaction or even communicate securely with health professionals.

Business Model? Pffft, Search!

Luckily, Google Health's business model isn't reliant on any sophisticated online health technology. What is the business model? Why, sending Google Health users to Google's search property of course!

Kraser admitted that "there is no direct monetization model for Google Health", rather their model "is simply that when people sign up, it tends to encourage users to do more searches on Google.com. That's where we make our money. Every page of Google Health has [a] search box on the side. If you click on it, it takes you out to Google.com."

But "none of your health data goes with [it]", she assured.

So it's slow progress in the online health world, if Google Health is anything to go by. The good news though is that it allows smaller more health-focused startups, like MyCareTeam, to create innovative applications and hook them into Google Health, Microsoft Healthvault, and other bigco initiatives - using APIs and the platforms the big companies are able to offer.

Click here for a good cause: Ask Google for a World Diabetes Day Doodle

The business model is largely serving ads, which allows the product to be free - although users can pay $250 $100 per month for an ad-free version. The company has just announced it has signed up 1,300 medical professionals since launch in November of 2007 and is currently serving "more than a quarter million patients."

Privacy Pain Point?

Apart from the ads, Practice Fusion also makes money by selling anonymized patient and doctor data from its system to third parties. Before the privacy advocates among us have heart attacks, the company says that it in both business models, it maintains strict privacy standards - in particular HIPAA compliance (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). In a recent New York Times article, Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard stated that their system doesn't collect "the names or other personally identifiable information of patients".

Flex-ible

In terms of the technical side of Practice Fusion, Adobe evangelist and all-round RIA expert Ryan Stewart looked into it back in March. After noting that it uses Adobe's Flex in the user interface, Ryan pointed out that historically EMR software has been expensive and painful:

"...there are huge costs associated with adding an EMR system. The major players; Misys and Nextgen cost a ton of money and manpower to implement. Practice Fusion on the other hand, is free, browser-based and has a relatively low barrier to entry."

In a separate post, ZDNet's Dan Farber also mentioned Cerner, Epic Systems and IDX as examples of old-school competitors that cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat.

Ease of use is to the fore in Practice Fusion's promotion materials; the company claims that users will be up and running in just 5 minutes ("live in five"). There's not much argument from us that a low-cost, streamlined browser service like Practice Fusion has a lot of potential. Although it will face the same issues that Google Apps has in the office software market - security, scalability, whether it's appropriate to host sensitive data in the cloud, and so on. Practice Fusion is targting small physician practices, which indicates that there's a long way to go before its solution will be viable for larger organisations, such as hospitals.

Click for larger screenshot

For more details about the Practice Fusion product, check out this article on healthcare epistemocrat.

Don't Call Them Consumers!

One of the interesting differences between how Practice Fusion is marketing its product and how Google is marketing Google Health, is in how they view the 'users'. Google CEO Eric Schmidt raised the ire of Practice Fusion's management in a recent speech at HIMMS. Advisory board member Graham Walker scolded Dr Schmidt in a blog post:

"Please stop calling patients consumers. Patients are people with illnesses or injuries who need medical care; consumers are people who purchase goods or services and are informed about what they're purchasing. (Most patients are not actively dictating what health care resources they're consuming.) Note: there are certainly consumers of health information, but a person who comes to me seeking medical attention is not a consumer. He or she is a patient."

Walker also claims that "the medical record is not the patient's property." He thinks that the model to use for the medical record in the Web era is 'shared control' - i.e. "the patient controls who sees the information in their medical record, but the patient's physician controls the actual information."

Conclusion

It does appear that Practice Fusion is a physician-centered tool, whereas Google Health and the other bigco services are consumer-centered - sorry, patient-centered. So I'm not sure it's accurate to portray Practice Fusion as a competitor to Google Health. Regular people can't even use Practice Fusion, it's a product for doctors and their staff.

It's good to see that a simple, web-based office management service is ramping up well in the health sector. But it's early days yet and the product hasn't made a splash in big markets.

Looking at the latest data, Hitwise predicts that Google would either enter the automotive or music market next. Both of these are very broad categories with a large range of competitors already operating in them, but then, that has never stopped Google from entering a new market.

Google Autos

Google could easily build a competitor to cars.com, Vehix, or Autotrader by tying together data from its Google Base product (which already has a 'Vehicles' category) and mashing it up into a more comprehensive used car market by also allowing users (or dealers) to easily put up their own cars for sale. As of now, Google is only aggregating data from all the major online car buying sites.

Google Music

Rumors about Google Music have flared up regularly over the last few years, but so far, no actual product has materialized. Entering the music business is obviously fraught with problems for any new player. Given the issues around licensing music, as well as its failure in selling videos on Google Videos, Google might not want to develop a mainstream music platform.

What Google could do, though, would be to offer a platform for independent musicians, somewhat akin to what MySpace was in its early days or what AmieStreet does today.

Google Travel

Given Google's background in search, we think Google might also be likely to develop a competitor to the large travel aggregator sites like Kayak or FareCompare. Not only is this a market where Google could develop a decent revenue stream outside of its core advertising market, but it would fit in right with Google's core expertise. As of now, Google only links to Kayak, Expedia, Hotwire and others when you enter the right query into its search engine, but it doesn't display any actual results itself yet.

Our Prediction: Travel is Next

If Google is indeed trying to fill out all of these major niches with a product of its own, we think a travel product is still Google's most likely next move. It is not only the closest to Google's core competency of search, but Google could also easily put ads on there as well.

I encourage you to check out the 5-minute video, embedded below. Admittedly it means more to me than most people, because I actually have diabetes. But it's an eye-opening video for anyone wanting to know how the Internet and web 2.0 can help change the healthcare system, right now.

Not a Magical Elixer

OK, let's be clear - the Internet is just an enabler. Of course there is a lot of work to be done to remove the piles of red tape and inefficiencies in healthcare. But it's good to see healthcare gradually become web-enabled and the video celebrates this. If nothing else, consumers have much more healthcare information at their fingertips via the Web and are able to gather and socialize with people in specialist social networks such as Diabetic Connect. Amy also noted in her email to RWW that the Web is "changing our relationship with the medical establishment & pharma companies, so they finally view us as consumers, demanding the right products and treatments to help us live better." Here's the vid:

See also:

• Health 2.0 - Apps & Trends to Watch
• Health Care at SXSW - Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd
• Top Health 2.0 Web Apps

Google Health is a decent entry into the game-changing (and potentially hugely profitable) world of health 2.0. But in comparison with other health startups, Google Health has a limited scope and is not as innovative a service as we've come to expect from Google...

Limitations

As of now Google Health is limited to english language and is available in the US only. So there isn't a lot to be gained for those of us outside the US uploading our medical records into Google Health. Perhaps we are better off using a truly global service, such as Australian startup MiVitals (our coverage). Although Google will over time open up Google Health to the rest of the world.

Google Health is limited in many other ways, chief among them is that users need to import their own data into the service - there is little in the way of automatic data entry from your health providers. This was a key issue we found with MiVitals too. As we've noted before, when it comes to health data there are a couple of key issues to overcome:

1) Ensuring that the data is ultra secure and that all privacy bases are covered; and

2) Getting healthcare professionals to use the system.

On the first issue, Google appears to have pretty strong privacy policies - indeed before you can even access the site you need to approve a fairly long Terms of Service page. For example Google is very careful to position this as an informational service, rather than a diagnostic one:

"Google Health does not offer medical advice. Any content accessed through Google Health is for informational purposes only, and is not intended to cover all possible uses, directions, precautions, drug interactions, or adverse effects."

However they still need to convince consumers that their data is truly safe on the Web - which with very personal data like health, is a tough ask. Even I'm not fully comfortable storing my health data online yet.

As we mentioned with MiVitals, the second issue is probably the biggest - and will require integration with existing healthcare IT systems. Google has made a start with the few partners it announced (limited to parts of the US).

Some of Google's initial health partners

However integration is a huge obstacle and one that many startups have tried to solve before, including in the original 'dot com' era. One was Jim Clark's famous Healtheon startup - as outlined in Michael Lewis' must-read dot com book The New New Thing, Clark (the co-founder of Netscape and one of Silicon Valley's enduring folk heroes) set out to revolutionize the healthcare industry in the US via an Internet startup named Healtheon. As the Wikipedia notes, Healtheon "developed software that essentially placed their company between physicians, patients, and health care institutions, eliminating unnecessary paperwork and facilitating networking and communication amongst the three." Although initially unsuccessful, in late 1999 Healtheon merged with the Microsoft-backed WebMD - and today the combined entity is considered the leading health portal.

Conclusion: Google Health Just Scratches the Surface

Google Blogoscoped has a good overview of the new service. But to us, it feels like Google Health is not much more than a glorified health search engine / portal - which to be fair is perhaps the whole point (Google's motto after all is to organize the world's information).

In terms of the market for health apps, it is still a nascent one - but both Google and Microsoft have been positioning themselves well. Microsoft announced their Health Vault initiative last October and in February they acquired Medstory, a vertical search engine for health information. Others in this market include Steve Case's Revolution Health and the current market leader in online health, WebMD. There are also a host of vertical search engines in the health field, including Healia and one of my favorites kosmix.

ReadWriteWeb has been covering health 2.0 for a while now. Check out some of our previous coverage in this fascinating sector of web technology:

• Health 2.0 - Apps & Trends to Watch
• Health Care at SXSW - Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd
• Top Health 2.0 Web Apps

As we mentioned in the 'Top Health 2.0 Web Apps' post, much of the current crop of health 2.0 apps are based on enhancing communucation, information sharing, and community; rather than tackling the bigger challenges like providing medical diagnosis over the Web. Google Health is a very good example, as it is basically just an information storage service - albeit a handy one because patients will be able to access their records much easier.

But that is slowly changing. Carol.com (a "care marketplace") and Sermo (a community for physicians to exchange information and collaborate) are two examples of new business models that are emerging in healthcare, using the Web (see the Top Health 2.0 Web Apps post for more detail). ZocDoc, which enables you to make doctor and dentist appointments online (currently limited to parts of New York), is another. Online diagnosis will happen too, for example automated online CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems).

So Google Health is a good start, alongside Microsoft Health Vault and the many other initiatives by startups and others who have been working on health data apps for some time. But the real action will be in online diagnosis and when web apps are integrated into traditional health systems.