What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [106]
Of course, banking and financial markets are regulated for good reason—not closely enough, judging by the results of the credit crash. We need to tread with caution in these areas. But the web presents new ways to think and do business, even in the stodgy old business of handling money.
I’m surprised the web hasn’t had a greater impact on the industry already. Every time I see a new retail space being built in my area, I get depressed when I see a bank move in. How useless. How unfun. I’d prefer another Starbucks or a Taco Bell or maybe an old-fashioned bakery. Why are banks still in the business of building so many retail outlets out of bricks and filling them with staff? When the internet arrived, so did some online-only banks, but they never flourished and many were bought up: in the U.K., Egg was acquired by Citi, First Direct by HSBC. They didn’t offer us enough incentive to change our habits. If online banks had passed savings onto us—the internet dividend in cash—maybe we’d have been motivated to go virtual.
The cashless society will probably come to the U.S. a day after the paperless office does—that is, never. We keep hearing about people in Finland and Japan buying Cokes and paying for parking with their mobile phones, but we haven’t seen that happen in the States. Microsoft wanted to become the cash register of the web with its Passport service, but I think no one trusted Microsoft to handle our money. Google’s Checkout service has not caught on. PayPal, now owned by eBay, has become an easy way for people to exchange cash, but too few merchants use it. Maybe we need a new virtual currency all the world could share that could become the basis of new financial systems. How does Googlebucks sound? In Google we trust.
Public Welfare
St. Google’s Hospital
Google Mutual Insurance
St. Google’s Hospital: The benefits of publicness
Too often when I find myself in a discussion about citizen journalists, some member of the press’ curmudgeonly class—thinking himself quite clever and apparently believing he just thought of this himself—will growl at me: “Why should I trust a citizen journalist? You wouldn’t want a citizen surgeon, would you?” No, I wouldn’t.
But I do want health care to open up to the Google age and take full advantage of the opportunities it presents to gather and share more data; to link patients with better treatment and information; to connect them with fellow patients in a community of shared experience and need; and to use the potential of collaborative tools and the open-source movement to advance medical science.
On my blog, I have violated the most sacred tenant of privacy advocates: I revealed and discussed my personal health information, writing about my bouts of atrial fibrillation (a sometimes irregular heart beat—I’m fine, thanks). I have received great benefit from opening my medical history to my readers. Fellow patients have given me support, sent me links to resources, shared their experiences about treatments I’ve considered, and sent me updates on companies working on new treatments. Even Google’s Sergey Brin blogged that he had learned he carried a gene mutation that may indicate a propensity for Parkinson’s disease.
Imagine how valuable it could be for us patients to go to a site to record our conditions and activities right before the onset of afib (the familiar name for the condition). In some people, too much food, wine, stress, or activity can trigger an attack; in others, these have no effect. Doctors have some of this data already, but only from limited samples. If millions of patients around the world shared their experiences, would we discover new triggers, new correlations, new causes, even new treatments? Don’t know. But we can’t know until we try, until we open up and provide the means to gather the information and analyze it.
PatientsLikeMe has created a platform for communities around a still-limited set of conditions,