Leave it to Google ...
07/08/2008
Life Insurance
By: Tim Bain
The ability to Google your medical records may be closer than you think. The Internet giant recently released Google Health, a health information service aimed at helping users store basic medical history, track medications, schedule doctor appointments, refill prescriptions, receive lab results online and a host of other related services.
The company will store personal health information on dedicated servers with additional security measures installed for protection. One long term goal of the project is to electronically maintain users' medical records. This would allow users to review and retrieve their own medical records at any time.
Privacy concerns will of course dictate how far we are from seeing this portion of Google Health become active. However, it will be well worth the wait for the life insurance industry. The storage of personal medical records has the potential to speed up the underwriting process significantly on life insurance applications. The current process of requesting medical records from an applicant's physician can take up to several weeks to complete. Imagine reducing that process to several days at most.
