You see, Google Health – which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web – can be a great service but it only becomes truly useful when your own health insurer and health care providers sign on to participate, since they are the ones who generate and keep your personal health data.

And flocking to it, they ain’t.

With today’s addition of both Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and the American Postal Workers Union Health Plan to the program, the current count of participating insurers is three (Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA joined late last year). Needless to say, there are hundreds more health insurance providers in the United States, so it’s going to be a long haul for Google to include the majority of them in the program.

And even then it’s going to be a challenge for them to provide a seamless service to users; Google in the past has admitted that wrong or incomplete data can cause Google Health to be more of a nuisance than an added value.

Amusing enough, today is the same day that sees the public launch of Keas, a VC-funded startup headed by former Google Health head Adam Bosworth. The fledgling company was profiled in the NY Times this morning and aims to combine personal data with general health information to deliver tailored health plans for individuals, designed by wellness experts. Bosworth has set up partnerships with both his former team and their biggest rival, Microsoft HealthVault.

Apart from the two new insurers, Google has also teamed up with more data providers, namely MDLiveCare and Hello Health.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Whether it be bills, insurance forms, medical records or prescriptions, patients are often inundated with vast quantities of paper. Google Health is now trying to help you organize all of this paperwork in its platform. Google Health, which finally launched last May after months of rumors, has ambitions to become a centralized and secure place to store medical records online.

The new feature lets patients upload scanned paper documents into your Google Health account. Google particularly suggests that you upload an “advance directive,” which determines your end-of-life wishes so that your family and doctor can honor them if you get sick and are unable to communicate. Google Health is actually working with a advance directive provider, Caring Connections, to provide a free, downloadable form customized for all 50 states. In order to complete the form, you need to download it, print it out, complete it, scan it, and upload it back to Google Health.

Google Health also recently launched a feature that gives users the ability to share their medical history with designated family or close friends. The whole concept of hosting medical records online raises security concerns for many but Google says it is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal.

In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals.

It seems that in the online medical records sector, partnerships with pharmacies, medical professionals, and institutions are key to making the platform efficient and more consumer-friendly. At some point in everyone’s lives, you realize the difficulty (and inefficiency) of getting your records faxed from a health care provider to an insurance company or another doctor. One of the primary virtues of an online database is that it streamlines the sharing process of medical records, and partnerships are key to making this process work. miVitals was lacking in this area; the startup had only developed partnerships with Australia-based medical companies and institutions despite the site’s aim to be an international resource for consumers across the world. Google Health has partnerships with pharmacies (Google Health recently struck a deal with CVS), insurance companies, hospitals and labs to integrate data from medical professionals with consumer information.

HealthVault’s online platform has been integrated with several large medical institutions over the country, including The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. And Microsoft has been able to sign in insurance companies-last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Kaiser to offer HealthVault’s health record site service to Kaiser’s members.

With competition coming from Google, Microsoft, WebMD, and more, it can be tough for a smaller competitor to find footing in the space. And the current economic crisis and lack of available funding isn’t helping. Perhaps the death of miVitals a sign that there isn’t room for small startups in the already crowded online medical records market.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The slow but steady march towards a unified online healthcare management system continues. Google has announced that it has forged a new partnership with CVS, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains, allowing CVS customers to import their full prescription history into Google Health. CVS joins other major pharmacies including Longs Drugs and Walgreens in offering the same functionality, which combined now allow over 100 million Americans to import their medical histories into Google Health, which launched last May.

It may not sound terribly exciting at first, but the ability to quickly look up a patient’s past and current medications is actually very important in an age when it seems that nearly everyone is on at least one prescription medication. While national pharmacies can typically look up what medications you’ve filled from other branches of their store, they can’t search through the systems of other chains, so they’re forced to rely on the patient to self-report their medical history.

Unfortunately most people have pretty poor memories when it comes to remembering their current and past medications, especially when they’re taking generic drugs, which can lead to some very dangerous drug combinations (the Google blog post notes that as many as 1.5 million Americans a year are harmed by dangerous medication interactions). By aggregating prescription histories in a single place (which users can then share with their doctors and loved ones), Google Health can help cut down on these harmful drug interactions.

Of course, a central hub for your prescription history is only really useful if you can import all of your prescriptions, not just most of them. And Google Health is still missing out on a few major players, including national store chains like Wal-Mart and Target. Google won’t comment on who they’re currently in talks with, but I suspect they’re trying to get as many of these chains on board as possible.

Google Health doesn’t seem to get as much attention as many of Google’s other properties, but my guess is that it will be among the company’s most important assets a few years down the line. The American healthcare system makes accessing past records, prescriptions, test results, and other important data a huge hassle, not to mention the ridiculously confusing (and uncentralized) hubs offered by health insurers and pharmacies. There are privacy issues abound with a centralized system (the fact that Google insists on labeling its health product as a Beta is definitely unsettling, as are the company’s past security issues), but the potential benefits may well outweigh the risks.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.

The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

One security measure that I don’t understand is the 30 day expiration Google Health is placing on each Shared link. Unless users resend their link every month, it sounds like this feature would be effectively useless in the event of an emergency. I’d prefer a system that allowed me grant permanent access to a close family member, which I could revoke at any time. Update: A commenter below points out that this expiration may only apply to the link itself, and that the sharing relationship remains in place indefinitely provided the link is used within 30 days. Google has confirmed that this is the case.

For those users who’d prefer to go the low-tech route, the site is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

With Google Health, you can:
* Build online health profiles that belong to you
* Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies
* Get personalized health guidance and relevant news
* Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services
* Share selected information with family or caregivers

The other thing to note is the logo (we’ve included it in this post), it would appear that Google Health is going straight to Beta and not through Google Labs.

Google Health has been hampered by chronic fatigue syndrome in terms of its development, with the site being rumored to launch originally in May 2006. Microsoft even beat Google in the space, having launched its own online health product in October 2007.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Vertical search makes a lot of sense for certain categories, and Health is one of them. Just compare the results for any health related search from Healthline, a well funded new health search site, to a standard search on Google.

The question I have is will Google do any content aggregation or even…gasp…original content…to turn their health search site into more of a Google Finance-like portal. Either way, Google Health will need to be very good to be better than Healthline.