The Evolution of Google

It's great to watch Google evolve as a company. I have one idea for Google that I think makes sense given their company mission, which is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I'm always frustrated by the need to fill in my medical health history every time I go to a new doctor/dentist/optician. Wouldn't it be great if Google would allow me to fill in a medical history form that they store in their network, together with security settings that allow me to control who gets access to the information? In addition, they would provide a web services API that allowed vendors with security permission to access the information. This has several benefits: (1) Doctors, dentists, etc. could get up-to-date information without hassling new clients (2) Hospitals, especially emergency wards, could get the information even when the patient is unconcious (3) When the information gets updated, all vendors that subscribe to the service would get the latest information. The business model could also be simple and lucrative. Make it free for consumers to enter the information and have it stored, and charge vendors a modest yearly fee for access to the information. Let's say that the charge to a vendor is $1 per year to access a particular person's information. The cost to a particular doctor would be pretty small, and patients would soon be demanding that their vendors use this Google information service. The revenue to Google would be in the billions, according to my rough calculations. Of course, the same model could be applied to storage of a person's address (useful when moving), travel preferences (useful to travel companies), resumes (useful to companies that want to hire) etc. The fact that people are already trusting Google to store their mail (Gmail) means that their brand is already evolving to earn the public trust for this undertaking. And I don't see any other company around, including Microsoft, that has the brand and clout to be able to compete against this effort. What could be the name of this service? GMed perhaps? Or maybe something more generic like GVault (emphasising the storage and security aspects) or GShare (emphasising the information sharing aspects)?

Comments

[Oksana]

Graham,

What a great idea! Why do you speak to the quire though? Or else, why would you give out a great idea and not sell it?... I'm sure you have thousands of ideas like this.

I actually hate it that there is already so much info about me in the ciberspace. But I guess there is no way of escaping it. It's all moving towards where every little detail about our lives will be somewhere in the database, onece it all gets consolidated.

[Kytari]

Yet another brilliant observation! I would certainly savor the opportunity to head up the information security portion of such an endeavor.

[Craig]

Yes, this would be great. Everyone is so bored of leaking credit cards onto the internet, with this information we could really do some damage.

[Graham Glass]

When Internet commerce started, leaking of credit card information was the big scare. Did it prevent the commerce from happening? No. I don't see why access to medical records is any different, and security implementations are a lot better now than they were 5 years ago.

[Pete]

This is ultimately what Microsoft is/was attempting with Passport, and other solutions like Gator were picking up on as well. Of course, security would be an issue, but we have always historically been willing to take the chance if the protection was reasonable (perhaps Verisign would be a better candidate for this endeavor). I happen to believe we would be better off putting the detailed information on a USB flash drive (or smartcard, what have you) and use a directory on the Internet as a link/index to it to connect to the trusted third party. Encryption is a must, in my opinion.

[Bob Watkins]

Hi, Graham.

TRW tried something like this a while back with their Credentials service. The idea was to enter your credit application info once, with them, and then when applying for credit somewhere the data would already be filled in for you.

I think the idea was ahead of its time, and there were issues about how TRW would use the data internally.

I have a different conception, that I've written about on my blog, "a free agent in training" http://fait.typepad.com : the customer should own their own data. Picture a "data bank" (like a regular bank, but you make deposits of your personal information). You tell the data bank that a given organization may USE your data. They can use the data to serve you, and aggregate it statistically. But they don't own it. You can revoke permission at any time.

Of course, they might copy the data once they have access to it - but the data will become stale over time as only the data bank version will be continually updated.

Here's the blog post in which I bring up the idea - enjoy!
http://fait.typepad.com/bwatkins/2004/05/who_should_own_.html