Discovered by Jasonahoule and reported by Engadget it appears that Google has started a trial providing citizens who are Googling specific health terms on their Android Smartphones with the opportunity to click a link to join a completely free Video Hangout with a Doctor.
mHealth Insights
T&C’s?
It’s surprising that details are limited because registered Doctors need very clear terms and conditions before they give medical advice (especially as they presumably have no previous medical history information on their Patient, limited capacity to provide follow up, etc).
Is this a Chat or a Consult?
I imagine Google are referring to the advice service quite informally as a ‘Video Chat’ with a Doctor rather than a ‘Video Consult’ (as you’d get with a service like we offer at 3G Doctor) because this will limit the T&C’s and responsibilities eg. Google could reason that a completely Free of Charge ‘Chat’ is to be perceived to be similar to meeting a Doctor within an impersonal, informal, non-committal occasion (which would fit well with an encyclopaedic type of general answer or a ‘yes you need to go and see your Doctor about this‘ conclusion).
Great news for Doctors who want to work with Patients beyond the office visit
I imagine the evidence from this trial (showing how safely you can improve access to Doctors) together with Google’s heavyweight lobbying resources will really help end the outdated legislation that prevents and discourages US Doctors from providing remote advice.
How long before this is gamed?
I wonder what Google will think up to stop a citizen from searching random health terms until they get offered a free Video Chat and then once live with a Doctor talking about whatever they really wanted to talk about?
Who are Google’s Doctors?
It’s probably safe to predict the consultations are being provided by
the Doctors on Demand service in a bid to ‘prime the pump’ and get Patients using their service (and presumably funding it with the millions of dollars they have landed in financing from Google Ventures and Sir Richard Branson) but I wonder if any mHealth Insight readers have anymore details on how or why Google are funding this trial?
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Google has always been several years ahead of the healthcare industry when it comes to advertising, but I wonder how keen Big Pharma will be on the direct to Patient advertising opportunities that these free Google Hangout Video Chats will offer? Why struggle to give away free branded pens & mugs to Doctors when you can invest in keywords so that you’re sponsoring only the Patients who want to have conversations with Doctors about your drugs?
[…] Engadget are reporting that Google has started a trial providing citizens who are Googling specific health terms on their Android Smartphones with the opportunity to click a link to join a completely free Video Hangout with a Doctor. […]
A telehealth chat service like this could help with the Ebola response by making sure that scared citizens are connected with people who are more likely to have answers, and by helping to minimize the number of people going to ERs and clinics as soon as they get “flu-like symptoms.” Note that flu season is coming and could easily overwhelm our care system. Without a better way to triage care, we’ll over-spend on false alarms while real Ebola cases slip through the cracks.
Hi Wayne,
I have no doubt we need to move on from the idea that everything needs to be channelled through office visits and this week I attended Google’s EMEA Performance Summit at their European HQ and was left in no doubt that public health initiatives are 10 years behind the super smart keyword advertising professionals I met with there. All the same I don’t think matching search queries initially with live Doctors will ever be a good use of the limited resources of such highly paid and extensively trained professionals especially as a first course of action when the priority is to control the spread of an infectious disease that is headlining all the broadcast news channels but is mostly prevalent in regions of the world where Doctor are already in desperate short supply.
To help with Ebola as a basic starter I think Google should continue to accurately match searches to quality information sources (eg. “ebola” searches to explanatory Youtube animated videos like this one from the BBC) as that would be much more effective (you wouldn’t have to wait for the Doctor to get the information you want), lower cost and wouldn’t further reduce the availability of quality Doctors (because unlike live Doctor video chats prerecorded videos are scaleable, can be easily translated, shared virally, etc).
Looking further out I think Google will take the advice of my good friend Prof John Bachman MD at the Mayo Clinic and introduce Patient History Taking tools to help Patients interact more effectively with Doctors while automatically enabling documentation that can aid surveillance, drive quality and enable feedback loops etc.
For more ideas check out the crowdsourced collection of ideas and suggestions for how mHealth can help limit and tackle Ebola outbreaks that I started over in the Linkedin mHealth group a few months ago.
FYI: Five years ago I blogged about the pressing need for the NHS to begin using a quality online questionnaire (like the one we use at 3G Doctor) in combination with rich multimedia educational content to manage another infectious disease outbreak (swine flu) because even the very well funded UK Healthcare system couldn’t cope with the extra workloads.