Google’s Eric Schmidt presented the closing keynote at the HIMSS conference this week where more details about their latest initiative, Google Health, emerged. Marissa Mayer gave a good overview but the specific details are really lacking here. I’d like to talk a little about each of these in turn:

Privacy & Security

When it comes to privacy and security with respect to your health records, I would think everyone agrees its absolutly paramount to the success of this initiative. However, Google has yet to explain how they will be securing this data. Is my only option to secure my account going to remain just a username and password? There have to be other options for locking this data down or your privacy will go out the window the instant your password is phished away from you. More on this below.

Platform

There’s no denying that Google knows how to organize the world’s information. They have a spectacular search platform and from the posting, it sounds like they are going to try to build a directory of third-party applications and vendors that can tap into your data as needed. Again, if I can secure my data and take it with me to other providers then we’re in great shape here.

Portability

This is the absolute key to success IMHO. Data portability doesn’t mean you’re interoperable with lots of providers as a clearinghouse; it means you have the means and will to provide tools and formats to allow users to use another service completely (that talks the same vocabulary). Google has been pretty good about this with their work with open document formats. Hopefully the same will be true with the health record data they will be storing.

User focus

Its interesting that they mention this because they mean it in a different way than I do. When I think of user focus, I think of making the user the center of the equation. This is important for a variety of reasons most important of which is that we don’t need yet another data silo where your data goes in and doesn’t come out. Google is referring specifically to their strength in building solid user interfaces and I strongly concur with this sentiment.

The User-centric Web

There’s another picture I’d like to paint here and one that I’d love to see Google (and other data repository-like sites) head towards. We have an opportunity with the existing open standards and protocols to create the user-centric web. The user-centric web puts the user, and not the sites, first. In this world, my OpenID would be the center of my personal universe on the Internet. Since its an OpenID, I should be able to choose any provider I want. My OpenID is not only a means to signing in to sites quickly and easily, its an end-point that should be the storehouse for my personal data. If you want access to my data, no problem, you just have to ask me. I’d be in complete control with a single choke point for everything I do and everything that defines me on the web. If I want to move to another provider I should be able to take my data with me by leveraging the open formats that have emerged to describe the data.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are continuing to accumulate massive amounts of data about users. They have started to join in these conversations about how to promote and ensure data portability but we’re not there yet. To me, the open web’s success will be quantified by the ability for users to be in control, move and manage who they are on-line.