A year ago at the HIMSS health care conference, previous Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt noticed that health care is still in the “stone age,” and is dependent on fax machines and pagers.
This week, at a similar conference in Orlando, Google appears to have recognized that the medical world’s stone age technology is here to stay for the foreseeable future. At the organization’s booth, participants detected a demo for a new health service that includes faxing medical data to Google Drive, the organization’s cloud storage service.
That way, physicians have “hassle free” access to the data when they need it, as indicated by marketing materials at the booth.
A representative for Google Cloud depicted the fax demo as a “prototype of the possibilities enabled by APIs and an open cloud platform.” In other words, while the item isn’t live yet, it’s a marker of what’s to originate from Google.
Google is contending with rivals Microsoft and Amazon to get its cloud service into the health care area. One methodology has included emerging by pitching its advanced technology, similar to machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can be utilized to parse health information.
None of that is conceivable if health information isn’t broadly open. Furthermore, nowadays, it’s as yet regular for medical data to be shared by fax, instead of in a PC readable format.
There are a couple of explanations behind that. First off, there’s convention. Some more seasoned specialists are OK with these innovations and would prefer not to release them. Faxes are additionally viewed as sheltered and secure under the present government protection laws for specialists to transmit restorative records.
“Every hospital, no matter how small, has a fax machine, so it’s the safest and easiest way to get the information you need,” said Nate Gross, a physician and the co-founder of Doximity, a start-up that came up with a product called DocFax that lets doctors send faxes without a physical fax machine, told CNBC.
Thus, health care is the only industry that still depends on such obsolete innovation. (CNBC recently provided details regarding the trend of millennial medical students not knowing what to do when approached to send a fax out of the first time.)
Google gives off an impression of being recognizing that it needs to meet health care clients where they’re at.
Also, they’re at the out-dated fax machine.
