5 Ways Google Can Make You a Better Doctor

Chris Cole

Published Online: July 17, 2009 - 12:00:01 AM (CDT)

Unexpected technology applications are transforming daily practice—everything from how you search for clinical information to how you share and store your data. As usual, Google is at the center of it all. But nowadays, the Web giant is about so much more than just search. Search is so 2007. Now, it’s all about the apps.

“The Internet is fundamentally changing the way doctors practice medicine by enabling greater access to medical information, easier collaboration with patients and colleagues, and economic opportunities for entrepreneurs in Health IT,” says Roni Zeiger, product manager, Google Health. “Many Google services have powerful applications for a physician’s daily work. For example, Google Alerts and Google Reader are great ways for physicians to keep up to date with new research and news in their practice areas.”

“We focus our coverage on apps that aren’t necessarily geared toward medicine but that, with a little bit of thought, could be well used in your dayto- day practice. “We are always looking for better ways to serve patients and physicians,” adds Zeiger. You might be surprised at what Google can help you achieve.

Create a website
Use the
Google Sites app to quickly and easily create customizable websites. How can you use this app? Let us count the ways:

• Use it to create a website for your practice.

• Organize a centralized online location for you and your project team (see an example at https://sites.google.com/a/altostrat.com/projecteggplant/Home).

• Create an intranet for your office or practice to disseminate news and announcements, update schedules, post messages and reminders, track projects and paperwork, and more (see an example at http://sites.google.com/a/organic-city.com/intranet/Home).

• Maintain communications and relationships with important vendors and other clients.

• Publish patient education resources so you can guide the content that your patients see and read.

The list is literally endless. To learn more about Google Sites and get started on your own projects, visit www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html.

Explore the Google Technology Playground
Stop by and visit
Google Labs
www.googlelabs.com
Google says that it’s “a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google. com. While some of our crazy ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be, well, just plain crazy.”

Before you get too carried away experimenting with the great apps and tools at Google Labs, a word of caution: The projects in Labs are intended to “showcase cool and wacky ideas but are not intended to be full-blown Google products. Labs experiments may be unavailable or be even removed without notice and you may not be able to access any of your data.” Google recommends that you not use sensitive information in a Labs experiment.

Having said that, what will curious physicians currently find in Google Labs?

Fusion Tables
http://tables.googlelabs.com
Use this app to manage large collections (up to 100MB) of tabular data “in the cloud.” You can share the data with whomever you like. Apply filters, aggregate and visualize your data on maps and charts, merge from various tables, export, and hold discussions regarding the info based on row, column, or cell all, right in Fusion Tables. Learn more at http://tables.googlelabs.com/public/tour/tour1.html.

Google Squared
www.google.com/squared
Google Squared is an experimental tool that takes a category (like “hypertension treatments”) and creates a matrix, or “square” of information, automatically “fetching and organizing facts from across the Web.” You can modify your square by “removing rows and columns you don’t like—or by adding new rows and columns and having Google Squared attempt to fetch the relevant facts.” Google Squared “does the grunt work for you, making research fast and easy,” and is excellent for compiling educational supplements for your patients.

Google News Timeline
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com
Use this tool to manage your news and other data chronologically “on a zoomable, graphical timeline.” Set the timeline to weeks, months, years, or decades, or use a timeframe in a given query, and navigate through the information by dragging the timeline. Sample queries using “EMR,” “autism vaccine,” and “Kathleen Sebelius” quickly produced an enormous amount of well-organized and timely information.

Similar Images
http://similar-images.googlelabs.com
One of our favorite apps we’ve seen yet in Google Labs, Similar Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. With the similar images feature, “most images have a link below them that lets you find other images like them. There’s no need for you to refine the text of your query. Your new results will be tailored based on whatever image you select.” So, if you’ve found a picture or graphic, but can’t figure out how to describe it, just click the similar images link to see “more like this.” Use it to find the perfect image for your next presentation, to illustrate patient education materials, and for a variety of other research purposes.

Empower Your Patients
Personalized health records are the future for portable, aggregated personal medical information.
Google Health
www.google.com/health already allows your patients to store and manage all of their health information in one central place. How does this benefit you? It allows them to keep you up to date with the latest changes to their health and information, eliminates the need for new patients to fill out the same paperwork over and over, prevents you from ordering redundant or already performed lab tests, and more.

More companies and vendors are partnering with Google Health in order to integrate patients’ records and information into their systems. The list already includes Allscripts ePrescribe, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Cleveland Clinic, CVS, Medco, Quest Diagnostics, and others.

EHR vendors are starting to take notice, and many of them are working with Google to develop functionality that will enable them to interface, with Google Health, allowing physicians’ EHRs to populate key data into patients’ Google Health records.

“Our hope is that as patients become more engaged in their healthcare and begin using the web to organize and manage their health information, more consumers will start asking their hospitals and doctors’ offices to use electronic medical records and integrate with consumer platforms like Google Health,” says Zeiger.

Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Forget your local medical library and PubMed and use Google Scholar to search for scholarly literature published in the form of peer-reviewed pieces, theses, books, and abstracts from any number of scholarly organizations, including professional societies, universities, and academic publishers. Search results are ranked by weight of the article’s full text, author(s), publication, and number of times it has been cited by other scholarly literature.

Google Docs for Docs
Collaborating on an article with colleagues at multiple locations? Don’t run the risk of losing valuable work and time by e-mailing documents back and forth—get out of the past and into the cloud!

Use Google Docs http://docs.google.com to upload text, spreadsheets, graphics, and more from your desktop. Control user access and edit your documents anytime, from anywhere. Share changes in real time in a secure virtual environment. Plus, “Google Docs has built-in capabilities to send an e-mail form, which could be a great way to gather feedback from patients,” says Zeiger.

What’s new at Google Docs? How about more than 70 new “themes” and templates for creating forms and documents; new functionality that lets you view your projects with all formatting intact on your favorite mobile device; improved footnote capabilities; analytics tracking; custom colors and fonts; a brand new interface for creating slide presentations; and more.

Take the tour at www.google.com/google-d-s/intl/en/tour1.html.

Got a tip, trick, or suggestion for making Google Docs even better? Share it at www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/label?lid=2040927159da752f&hl=en.

More Apps than You Can Shake a Stick at
Be sure to check out these additional noteworthy apps, both in released and “Google Labs” states.

Voice
Get one phone number for your office, mobile, home, BlackBerry, hospital, or other phones; assign which one(s) ring(s) based on who’s calling you; get all voicemails transcribed; and call anyone in the US, all for free.

Moderator
This Google Labs offering allows physicians to host staff meetings, discussions with colleagues, and even potentially grand rounds with participants who can be anywhere that Internet access is available. Offering collaborative Q&A for group events, the app helps “keep things on track by allowing users to both suggest questions and vote on others’ questions.”

Translate
Provide resources to patients in any of more than 40 languages through your website, translate patient pamphlets in any of these languages, or offer patients prescription information in their own language using this instant translator. “Take 2 with water” becomes “tomar 2 con el agua” in less than a second.

Knol
Currently in beta stage, Knol enables anybody to share what they know with the world, specify the level of collaboration with the community, connect with other experts with similar interests, and see their great content become visible on popular search engines.

Audio Indexing
Don’t want to sit through an entire presentation from the latest annual conference of your society of choice? Use the speech technology of this app, from Google Labs, to jump right to the good stuff based on your search terms.

Sets
Enter a few items from any given set (eg, EMR, HITECH, technology) and this Google Labs app will provide a large or small—you decide—set of related items to be searched for using Google Search.

Alerts
Keep track of the latest news in your field or monitor the developing acetaminophen story with Google Alerts, sent right to the e-mail inbox of your choosing. The app allows users to search just about any topic, choose from various types of sources (eg. blogs, news, video), and determine how often the alerts arrive.

News
Going beyond the traditional news aggregator, Google News displays similar stories in groups, with each only appearing after having been ranked based on how often and on what sites it appears. You personalize the news to only cover the topics of most interest.

Michelle

- November 3, 2009 - 11:32:31 (CST)

"Forget your local medical library." Nice, let's promote more incomplete research techniques by relying solely on Google. Being a medical librarian I know most Doctors have neither the time or the inclination to do research on their own. If they did I wouldn't be getting calls all day from frustrated secretaries or nurses who need a search done for a Docotr or who don't understand how to search in the first place. All these fancy apps won't do a darn thing if people don't have the search techniques or time. That's what the library is for. You may think you can replace libraries but all you will get is poor quality of research.

Vasumathi

- November 3, 2009 - 12:02:41 (CST)

Google "everything" have their places. Google Sites is fine for those who have the time to check out how to use it. And of course beyond a point one can get stuck with certain problems. Because there is a limit to how much "anything free" can be fulfilling. "Forget your medical library"????? Today medical libraries are "reaching out" to their users; - unfortunately users do not know HOW MUCH the libraries are involved in getting stuff to them. In the last 1.5 years I have done 35 training programs for doctors on how to search. And no - very few were computer-illiterate - most were tech savvy. Information theory is something that librarians are best at - how much ever technology buffs scream otherwise

Valerie

- November 3, 2009 - 12:04:52 (CST)

My sentiments exactly Michelle. As I am reading all of this I am thinking of my last visit to the Dr.'s office. My doctor has a very automated and technically advanced office management system. All records are electronic, and they carry tablets to record all notes. It is amazing and the man still runs an hour behind because he just loves to talk to people. Why would someone, that wants to spend time with people, want to spend time making up all of these applications? He wouldn't and doesn't. He has "people" that handle the technology. So it is not physicians that will be building these brave new places, it will be their "people." And if they really want these brave new places to be quality, why don't they let people that really understand information build them for them, like maybe Medical Librarians? Just a thought! DOH!

Roberta

- November 3, 2009 - 12:23:53 (CST)

I am a medical librarian and agree with Michelle and Valerie. Librarian's are trained in information searching and retrieval. I have news for the "techie experts" out there who think Google Scholar is going to replace a well-executed search done in a medical literature database such as PubMed/Medline. I just ran an experiment and searched the term "diabetes" in Google Scholar to see what kind of results I obtained. The first hits were all to articles from the ADA journal Diabetes. I clicked on one of the article links only to discover it was an article from OCTOBER 1985!!! That would not be very helpful to a physician looking for the most current information about diabetes studies/treatments would it (and how many physicians would even notice the date of the material???). Point made. Medical librarians are more needed than ever before!!!!

Linda

- November 3, 2009 - 12:26:56 (CST)

No question Google Scholar is great compared to the PubMed interface, but forget the medical library?! And how, exactly, am I supposed to get the full text of the book/article instead of just the abstract? Pay for each article individually? Now THAT's gonna reduce the cost of healthcare! Medical libraries are the best deal around - the REAL giants. Google Squared hasn't yet reached its potential. Its search is not very intuitive and textwords often generate no results. Still a long way to go there but looking forward to see it develop.

Sarah Plain

- November 3, 2009 - 12:41:20 (CST)

I appreciate some of the things pointed out about Google tools. I agree that Google has a host of tools that can make delivering well informed care in the medical environment easier and more efficient. This article would have been more useful, though, if the author has been more specific about what tools were in lab phase and which ones were established. And seriously, "Forget your local medical library and PubMed..."??? This author is clearly not a doctor, nurse, allied health professional or a librarian and he clearly has never had to actually do a literature search for patient care or research purposes. Many health science libraries teach their patrons how to get the most out of Google Scholar and they have their paid-for online collections integrated into Google Scholar so that their patrons can easily access the full-text. Truth is, very little of the medical literature is available for free online but libraries are doing everything they can to make it available in the easiest way possible. While Google Scholar is nifty, the search interface is limited and when a complicated search needs to be done, PubMed has a host of free tools to help narrow the literature. Forget your library? If it wasn't for the library most patrons wouldn't even know how to use Google.

Sarah Plain

- November 3, 2009 - 12:41:55 (CST)

I appreciate some of the things pointed out about Google tools. I agree that Google has a host of tools that can make delivering well informed care in the medical environment easier and more efficient. This article would have been more useful, though, if the author has been more specific about what tools were in lab phase and which ones were established. And serisouly, "Forget your local medical library and PubMed..."??? This author is clearly not a doctor, nurse, allied health professional or a librarian and he clearly has never had to actually do a literature search for patient care or research purposes. Many health science libraries teach their patrons how to get the most out of Google Scholar and they have their paid-for online collections integrated into Google Scholar so that their patrons can easily access the full-text. Truth is, very little of the medical literature is available for free online but libraries are doing everything they can to make it available in the easiest way possible. While Google Scholar is nifty, the search interface is limited and when a complicated search needs to be done, PubMed has a host of free tools to help narrow the literature. Forget your library? If it wasn't for the library most patrons wouldn't even know how to use Google.

Kathy Fatkin

- November 3, 2009 - 1:35:39 (CST)

EIRMC16@cableone.net

Connie Schardt

- November 5, 2009 - 3:30:07 (CST)

Google is an amazing resource for things like finding a product review or getting instructions on how to replace the hard drive in a MacBook. But when it comes to health care and making decisions regarding the care of patients, getting "something" is not the same as finding a good answer to a clinical question. Google, with its access to billions of pieces of information, can always find "something". But one needs to understand that important medical journals may not be included in the Google search results; that the results may not show the most recent journal articles; that, at this time, Google searches just for the words typed into the search box and does not include synonyms or alternative terms; and that one cannot easily refine the results to specific age groups or types of trials. There are medical databases (Medline, Cochrane, ACP Journal Club) specifically designed for the medical profession. We know that one of the barriers to using these more sophisticated tools is time. That's when you should remember your medical librarian, who is trained to expedite finding relevant and accurate medical information on specific patient care problems. The answer to the barrier of time is not to always make the tools simpler but rather to reallocate the time to a medical librarian who is trained and ready to help busy clinicians find the information they need to take care of their patients. Don't have a medical librarian? Contact the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (http://nnlm.gov/) for medical libraries and librarians in your area.

Patty Kahn

- November 6, 2009 - 2:55:55 (CST)

Thank you, Connie, for the perfect response regarding specificity of search terms and refining search results. REMEMBER your medical library. And if you can't get to your librarian, you're still better off in PubMed than wallowing around in Google. [Connie Schardt, for those who don't know, is the current president of the Medical Library Association.]