The Google froth turned up an interesting op-ed from the Guardian newspaper in London. Apparently the Conservative party has started agitating for use of systems like HealthVault and Google Health to replace the large, centralized National Health Services databases. Certainly fits the small-government agenda, but as the article correctly points out there’s a lot more in a real EHR than you’re going to find in HealthVault. Patients do need their records – but so do physicians.
The Guardian: Don’t ask the public to care for its data.
To be fair, the proposal only came from a think tank, and they weren’t really focusing on healthcare per-se; they were focusing on large government programs. But still, I’ve heard the same question come up from very educated sources outside the health and health IT areas.