A great article from the Google Blog, about what google is doing with the Health care system, and ways to provide more integrated and transparent information:

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

Now, of course - there are some DEFINITE privacy issues here.  However, I think most of the pertinent  information is ALREADY shared, back and forth, between medical agencies and insurance companies.  This would be making that information that already exists (and is shared a lot of times, when we don't know it) available to the "health consumer" as it were.

Thoughts?

Awhile back I blogged about Blackboard, and how they filed for a pretty obvious patent - e-learning - and were granted it.  Then they turned around and sued another e-learning company. 

The patent is pretty bogus, so I am glad to see a group challenging it.