EightBlack.

I wrote a little while ago about my disappointment with Marissa Mayer’s session on the pending launch of Google Health.

Criticising Google makes me wince a little. And later today, I’m about to drive down to the Googleplex for a meeting…

It’s not that I think they’re infallible. They’re not. But I do have a huge respect for what they have achieved and their single minded focus on where they’re heading. The “don’t be evil” thing is going to bite them in the arse one day, but that is for another time to discuss…

I for one minute don’t doubt that Google couldn’t (or won’t) revolutionise the way the US medical system accesses information. If there’s one company that could apply their search and indexing intelligence to a train wreck of an industry - it’s Google. And while I’m not an American - I am married to one and we spent 3 years living here. Even by the time I left, I still couldn’t figure out how the goofy system works.

So, back to Marissa’s session.

Presenting to the Web 2.0 Summit constituency must be no walk in the park. There are some seriously smart bastards in the audience, who drink way too much Red Bull and who would not pass a radiation test due to the sheer amount of wi-fi saturated into their system. Or something like that.

But Marissa’s no slouch. She’s a pro at the “seminar session” and talking to 1200 odd technology geeks - well, she eats this stuff for breakfast.

Google made their intent known with “health” 2 weeks after Microsoft announced it was making a play in the space. It was no secret. The blogosphere is full of Google Health posts and screen shots have already leaked (see below).

From her session today…

“If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”

Google isn’t a doctor but people come to us with a lot of health needs…

According to Information Week,

“Google has developed a prototype online platform for its health offering that incorporates personal medical records, health care-related search features, diet and exercise regimens, a localized “find a doctor” application, and other elements, Mayer confirmed. The company has shown the prototype to unspecified partners and is having both Google employees and “trusted testers” beta-test the system.

While the focus will be on improving health care and making records more accessible and portable for patients, Google will also improve life for physicians, Mayer noted.

“The goal for a lot of doctors is how many patients can they see in a day,” Mayer said. “That means their minutes per patient has got to go down, and the less time they have to spend finding and going over patient records the better. Ultimately we will design a product that’s useful for users, and also helps doctors do their job more quickly and more efficiently.”

Given that in the US alone, in excess of 2 billion x-rays are taken each year, the digitising of this data in itself must scare even the most resilient IT Manager at Google. We’re talking terrabytes and petabytes of storage required.

The thing I noticed after the session was people were wanting more from the presentation. In fact, they sort of expected it. There was nothing within her brief 20 minute stint that revealed anything new. And if ever there was an audience who you shouldn’t “bait”, this is it.

It was almost like the “Top 10″ list that she presented as a sort of tongue in cheek scenario, was a fill in because she had nothing else that she either didn’t want to (or couldn’t) say.

Most people expected more from this session. I know I did.

I wanted to see Google lift the lid off the application and interface they’ve built. I wanted them to actually show us. Even just a little bit.
In many respects, the Web 2.0 audience is pretty safe. They’re well connected and are probably, collectively, a decent PR machine.

One things for sure though. Ballmer and his team won’t be caught out with this “play”. There’s way too much at stake and for once, Microsoft made the first move with their entry into the game.

Google Health is slated to launch early 2008. Interesting times ahead for sure…

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Google, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.