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.

New model of application development

We can't stop thinking about individual's privacy while we are finding the way to get out of the hurdle laid by conservative IT infrastructure. It's always in doubt that whether data security and privacy for application hosting can be maintained successfully at outside company.

In U.S., Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) announced the requirements to protect individual's protected health information. No matter if such important information is going to be embedded in the message or transferred over the public Internet, it should be encrypted with technologies like 256 bit AES algorithms. In the programming point of view, it's an idea in mind when we are dealing with such kind of information. Then, how about the server where our applications are sitting? Are they secured enough to provide web services to the public while both data security and individual's privacy can be maintained?

Application developers need to consider a stable platform for baby-sitting their applications. To minimize the cost of setting up expensive and ever-changing hardware of the application server, Amazon gave out a solution - Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2). It is not difficult to image that nowaday developers build their own application image and plug it into the computing cloud whenever they want. Flexible charging model makes this happen. You can choose hourly based model or data transfer based model. People can release concern about the hardware restriction on their applications, in terms of time and money. Once a vitual machine image is built up and the programming souce codes are deployed ready, it is just one click action to start your application on the Internet. It really shortens the time to customize the system environment. People want to sell their application but they may not want to spend time to build up I.T. infrastructure on their own.

System virtualization can be done in-house, but you'll need to make sure your system environment safe and sound. Now we need one step forward to facilitate our services in a real 24/7 situation. I could image it brings lots of opportunities to the application developers, based on this new charging model from Amazon.