On Wednesday, Google unveiled a redesign of its personal health record service Google Health, which includes more user-friendly features that provide new data management controls for users and a greater focus on wellness and fitness, PC Magazine reports (Albanesius, PC Magazine, 9/15).
History
Google launched its PHR service about two and a half years ago to provide consumers with a platform to aggregate and organize their personal health information, including:
Medical records;
Prescriptions; and
Immunization and health condition data.
Aaron Brown — a senior product manager at Google — said that over the past several months, Google began looking at ways to improve the service to provide more than just PHR management capabilities.
Changes
Brown said the company conducted “a complete overhaul of the user interface” to make Google Health more intuitive to use (Miliard, Healthcare IT News, 9/15).
The new features include:
A revamped dashboard that merges health and wellness information to one location;
Capability to maintain notes and a journal about a specific health condition or medication;
The ability to remove or restrict access to old or outdated information (PC Magazine, 9/15); and
Tools to enter data from mobile devices into the dashboard (Healthcare IT News, 9/15).
In a Google Blog post, Brown explained that the redesign offers better organization of medical information and more user-friendly access to daily check-ins (PC Magazine, 9/15).
