Now that Google Health is live I decided to give it a spin. As I said in a earlier post I don’t think much of these efforts but Google is a big name and maybe that alone will get PHR’s in the public eye. Well, its worth a try. I have used other PHR systems but I am going to approach this from scratch. I will try to keep track of my time and comment on the interface. I won’t do this all at once so it will be a number of posts. I will try to include screen grabs when I can .
Further, when I think I need data from other health organizations I will try to contact them and see if they want to join the party. Let’s see how deep the PHR rabbit hole really is!
So lets get started. I’ve decided to go right to medications. I am doing this because this is where my main concern is, drug interaction. I take a number of medications and I know that there is a risk because of the blood thinner that I take.
The first issue is, do you have the medications handy, or do you have a list that you keep with you. I have the latter, a list from my wallet.
Here’s the screen when your trying to pick out your medications.
OK, if you don’t have this list you’re lost. The real disappointment came when I finished putting in all my medications. Then I went to the Drug Interaction section. When I went there I go zero results. So I went back and only then did I realize that I need to enter the drug dosage information. Why is this a separate step, in AllScript you don’t have this separated.
So we have to go back and enter our
dosage information. If you going to separate the two steps you need to inform users that all details are needed to get the interaction advice.
A small annoyance, there are an add and edit link for each medication. After trying the add button I realized it there if you take combinations of the same drug. How hard is it to explain this in plain English. I added a record and then had to delete it and “edit” it in the right place.
This could be tough, but some medicines come in multiple doses and you may take a combination of two dosage levels. Maybe just label it as dosage 1, dosage 2.
OK, now I’ve entered all my medications. At this point I am ready to see the results of the Drug Interaction. I will cover this in Part 2. In the meantime I will talk to my pharmacy, Target, and see if they are going to work with Google Health. I know I have other medications that are not active that they have in their database. This should be interesting.
By Jordan Glogau
Google