The Electronic Personal Healthcare Records
1. The e-PHR are definitely a convenient way to help people follow up the tendencies of their heath and provide a way to track the changes in data in order to understand when a health problem may have occurred. Google Health was a service that as trying to provide this opportunity to average internet users, which seemed like a solid idea in the beginning. However, as Google claims itself in its blog, Google Health was not as popular among the users as it was supposed to be, so in January 2013 the service was stopped (Google, 2013). Other sources suggest that Google Health had more reasons to fail that unpopularity. For instance, the fact that people trusted real doctors and hospitals to track their health records more than a digital service (PHR review, 2012). Considering that Google announces the discontinuation of the service four years ago, it seems slightly impossible to imagine how it would be possible to use this service in a research.
2. It is doubtless that e-PHRs are the easy to use tools which help to keep track of the medical information and could potentially provide a great support to the healthcare field. Indeed, the most popular e-PHRs are HealthVault by Microsoft and Google Health by Google. However, due to its unpopularity, Google Health stopped its existence in January 2013, so no matter how good the security options were there, it would be impossible to use this service today. On the other hand, HealthVault is still properly functioning nowadays and still is a rather popular service among the users, so it would be profitable to use it for both everyday life and research (Bhandari, 2012). The service provides a variety of functions and opportunities, such as keep track of the allergies, follow the development of the chronic diseases, share all the medical information with the doctor, and so on (HealthVault, 2017). Thus, HealthVault would be a more profitable suggestion to use during either everyday life of conducting researches.
References
Bhandari, V. (2012). Enabling programmable self with HealthVault (1st ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media.
Google. (2013). An update on Google Health and Google PowerMeter. Official Google Blog. Retrieved 3 January 2017, from https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html
HealthVault,. (2017). Microsoft HealthVault. Microsoft HealthVault. Retrieved 3 January 2017, from https://www.healthvault.com/
PHR review. (2012). Why google health failed?. Phrreviews.com. Retrieved 3 January 2017, from …
