Google Health: a valuable lesson on eHealth project

Just got the news about Google going to tidy up their stocks before the year end. Google Health has been chosen for termination and actually it is not the only one project to be closed down by the big boss in 2012. Medical records are always binding to a legal burden which hinders the developers in terms of data sharing and peer review. It's just not ready to be opened to the public in many cases. One way or the other, the users need to give trust to their treating doctors and let them read the records. Once the records go online, the service provider must hold the responsibilities to protect the patient's data which is actually binding to the law like HIPAA in U.S.. Different countries have different laws to govern how clinical data can be shared and handled. This is immediately turned into a legal issue once any mistake happens in between the service provider and the users. Even Google has a team of lawyers to guard against all those lawsuits potentially arisen among the people in U.S., it added up the cost of protecting those assets of clinical data which are not legally owned by the service provider. As the wised reckon, Google try to use a small team to conquer a large universe of data but that universe of data was not there. It may be residing somewhere under the influence of law, nonetheless, it is just out of reach for the Internet Giant.