As most of you probably know, I’ve been a big fan of the Google Plus hangout. In fact, I’ve been doing a series of using the Google Plus hangout technology.

Google recently announced a twist on the Google Plus hangout technology that they’re calling . These Helpouts are “real help from real people in real time” as it says on the website. Some of the help is Free and in other cases you have to pay a fee to get help. Why am I talking about this on a mobile health website?

The answer is simple. is one of the first partners to work with Google Helpouts. You’ll see on that page that if you’re a One Medical Group member in one of their cities, then you can get Free Medical Advice on the Google Helpout. Pretty cool, except for the fact that I’m not a member or in any of those cities, so I can’t try it out. They do offer Health and Wellness Coaching and Nutrition Counseling for $30 per helpout and $65 per helpout respectively.

My first question after seeing this was, “Are Google Helpouts HIPAA compliant?” The answer is probably that it depends. If I as a patient give permission to do it, then it’s fine. Although, if I’m One Medical Group, I wonder if they were able to get Google to sign a business associates agreement. Considering Google’s track record with Google Health, I’ll be really surprised if they did. Although, they should.

This should be of interest to all those people in the Telehealth world. Obviously, One Medical Group has a unique care model that makes this possible. However, once you start giving patients something like this, it’s hard to take it away. Plus, other patients start getting jealous of their friends and start wanting the service as well.

Hopefully these Google Helpout medical visits will help to crack this open and make the e-Visit a reality.

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November 8, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Telemedicine
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Fierce Mobile Healthcare has a great up talking about Google entering the activity tracking market with an Android app called Google Now. Turns out that is a lot more than just a fitness activity tracker. I think that Google looks at Google Now as the smart part of your phone that keeps track of what you’re doing and tries to provide real time information based upon all the data about you. It’s the next level Siri if you want to think about it that way. So, it makes sense that Google Now would also try and understand your health in the process.

While it’s interesting to see Google get back into the Health game after the failure of Google Health to get any traction, I think this is a really smart move. Plus, why isn’t the smartphone your activity tracking device? I know very few people who leave their house without their smartphone, but I know very few people who want to wear any other device all day every day.

Sure, your smartphone won’t track your activity level perfectly, but it can get pretty close. The battery won’t last as long as the other activity trackers along with other issues. However, when you look a the core technology in the fitness trackers and your smartphone, they are pretty close. I’ll reach out to some of my mHealth device friends to get their thoughts on the difference. Maybe there are a number of other issues I’m not thinking about.

We’ll see how this evolves, but the more we can make mHealth activity tracking a normal part of people’s routine, the more likely we’ll see results from it.

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January 18, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Android  Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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. Google Health in stasis.
via web
Steve Aylward

I think anytime you hear about Google struggling with something it causes you to at least slow down and think about it.  This is a company that has revolutionized so many things in technology.  They are so strong that Microsoft continues to be foiled in trying to compete in Google’s neighborhood.

Some may see this as a bad sign for the mHealth industry, but I really just think it shows how important it is to find your market and stick with it.  Obviously the people at Google know their business well, but that doesn’t mean they are experts at everything.

mHealth has tremendous potential, but like any other industry there are more people that fail than succeed.  It is also interesting that Google has continued to pursue this industry despite almost falling apart more than once.

They have not been shy to shutdown other ventures that have proven unsuccessful but their persistence in this area should show the value that they think it possesses.  This is definitely an industry that is only going to get bigger, and with the right tools will create many success stories.

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May 13, 2011 I Written By

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:    Healthcare IT    mHealth Future