I finally got around to trying out Google Health today. Part of my tardiness to jump out there and test yet another PHR product has to do with the absolute boredom of entering my own health information over and over again into an instrument that should be able to do most of the heavy lifting on its own. I was impressed, however, with the way the product works and happy to see the small flock of providers, like Cleveland Clinic and Walgreens, who already have built bridges into the system allowing users to port their data in automatically.

This sort of openness will become the standard in our industry for good reason. Vendors are often slow to provide the solutions that we need and this has often put us in the position of writing our own software. This would seem all too appropriate because we are the closest to our subject matter. But in practice, we rarely have the development talent or resources like that of a Google or Microsoft so the products tend to be short-sighted or have bush-league usability. And why should we throw excessive resources at something that is not our primary mission?