Google Exploring Tool Designed to Help Patients Use Their Health Records

In recent times, Google has been working on a tool designed to help clinicians filter complicated patient information more quickly and view it in context.   Now it’s thinking about doing the same thing for consumers.

Google began to test the professional tool, which it calls Care Studio, with small groups of clinicians in Nashville, TN and Jacksonville, FL affiliated with the Ascension system. A few weeks ago it announced that it is expanding the pilot to embrace additional physicians and nurses.

But the big G’s health data filtering efforts aren’t aimed just at doctors and nurses. According to a new piece appearing in Stat News, the search giant’s early in the process of putting feedback on how patients might want to see, organize, and share their own medical record data.

Google is apparently recruiting about 300 patients for the health record study, drawing on community health facilities academic medical centers in California, Atlanta and Chicago that use Epic as their EMR vendor. Patients can only participate if they use an Android device.

As part of the program, users will test features giving them the ability to collect information from their providers’ patient portals, a spokesperson told Stat.