Google, IBM Promote Online Health Records

Google, moving to improve its online health-record service, is teaming with International Business Machines to allow patients to add data generated from home-health monitoring products, such as blood-pressure cuffs and glucose meters. The companies said software developed by IBM, with consumers' permission, can shift the data into a personal health record in Google Health, the search giant's service for helping consumers manage and store their health information online. Other software lets the patient transfer the information from there to an electronic medical record kept by providers like health-care companies and primary-care physicians. At a time when the Obama administration has made electronic health records a priority and included funds in the stimulus plan to encourage providers to adopt records, the collaboration between the two companies has the potential to "kick-start" use of online monitoring of chronic diseases, said Dan Pelino, general manager of health care and life sciences for IBM. Both IBM Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano and Google CEO Eric Schmidt have been prominent in business leaders' meetings with President Obama on high-tech stimulus measures. Still, the electronic health-records industry -- and Google's attempt to help spur and organize it -- are in a very early phase.