Pharmaceutical Business review

Cleveland Clinic and Google collaborate in new health offering

The Google offering will assist providers like Cleveland Clinic to create a new kind of healthcare experience that puts the patient in charge of his or her own health information. The pilot, an invitation-only opportunity offered to a group of Cleveland Clinic PHR users, plans to enroll between 1,500 and 10,000 patients. It will test secure exchange of patient medical record data such as prescriptions, conditions and allergies between their Cleveland Clinic PHR to a secure Google profile in a live clinical delivery setting. The ultimate goal of this patient-centered and controlled model is to give patients the ability to interact with multiple physicians, healthcare service providers and pharmacies.

The pilot will eventually extend Cleveland Clinic’s online patient services to a broader audience while enabling the portability of patient data so patients can take their data with them wherever they go-even outside the Cleveland Clinic Health System. By integrating with the Google platform, Cleveland Clinic is helping create national access to electronic medical records at no cost to the user or provider.

Martin Harris, chief information officer of Cleveland Clinic, said: “This collaboration is intended to help Google test features and services that will ultimately allow all Americans (as patients) to direct the exchange of their medical information between their various providers without compromising their privacy.”