Thoughts on health care, continued

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP</span><br /><br />As <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html">I indicated in my post last week</a>, I've been interested in the issue of health care and health information for a while. I just spoke at a conference about some of the challenges in the health care system that we at Google want to tackle. The conference, called <a href="http://www.phrconference.org/">Connecting Americans to Their Health Care</a>, is a gathering focused on how consumers are transforming health care through the use of personal health technologies.<br /><br /><a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/bosworth_healthcare.pdf">This speech</a> will give you some insight into the problems that we believe need our attention. There are, of course, other challenges in health care that we plan to work on, and we'll share more information with you about the solutions we're trying to develop as this work advances.

Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP As I indicated in my post last week , I've been interested in the issue of health care and health informatio...

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Chatting with Lotus Sametime

<span class="byline-author">Posted by </span>Mary Himinkool, New Business Development<br /><br />When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for <a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html">XMPP federation</a>, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard.<br /><br />Today, we're excited that <a href="http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=192209">IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5</a>. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability.<br /><br />It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a>, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!

Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief th...

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Staying informed with Google News search

<span class="byline-author">Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.</span><br /><br />In the information age, currency of information has high value. As someone who cannot see, I find having to skim many different news sites to stay caught up even more difficult than the average web user. As in most things, off-loading some of this work to the machine is the answer, and what better machine to offload the work to than <a href="http://news.google.com">Google News</a>. <br /><br />In addition, finding relevant news stories through Google News helps me navigate directly to the news story on the originating site. Even if the originating news site is itself visually complex, Google has done most of the hard work of surfing that site and getting me to the content I need to read. Combined with Google News finding and grouping related stories on a given topic, this is an especially effective way of staying informed.<br /><br />Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/">Google Reader</a>). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on <a title="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom" href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom">XForms</a>. For topics on my watch list I create <a href="http://www.google.com/alerts">Google News alerts</a>. In addition, <a href="http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html">Google News provides feeds</a> (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader. <br /><br />Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/news/index.html">Google News also provides a Mobile version</a> that is very speech-friendly. For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the <a href="http://www.google.com/m">Google wireless transcoder</a> so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud.

Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as ...

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Teach for America and Google join forces

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager</span><br /><br />Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a tailspin trying to figure out what to do next. My friends and I considered the usual options: grad school, i-banking, gigs with tech companies and consulting firms. And then there was <a href="http://www.teachforamerica.org/">Teach for America</a> (TFA), an organization dedicated to eradicating educational inequity by enlisting thousands of elite college grads to teach in under-resourced schools. I joined TFA in 1995 and went from college student to inner-city first grade teacher (of 36 students!) practically overnight. Teaching was, without a doubt, the most challenging and the most rewarding job I have ever had.<br /><br />TFA continues to be a popular destination for college grads today. Since the mid-90s, its enrollment has more than tripled and its applicant pool has quadrupled. As a Googler and former TFA'er, I was thrilled to hear that Google is partnering with TFA to provide two-year deferrals for students who receive offers from both institutions. Now bright, idealistic college grads don't have to choose between two exciting and worthwhile career opportunities. Our partnership enables college grads to get real-world experience and to bring the insight and experience they gain in the classroom to bear in their work at Google. By joining forces, Google and TFA will be able to attract individuals who are capable of the hard work, commitment, and creativity it takes to teach and to be a Googler.<br /><br />Visit <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica">www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica</a> to find out more about this great program.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Update:</span></span> Corrected author attribution.

Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a ta...

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Seeing RED

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP</span><br /><br />You might have noticed from our homepage that today is <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=World+AIDS+Day">World AIDS Day</a>. We want to remember all those who have suffered from HIV/AIDS in the 25 years since it was first identified, and we want to support everyone working to eradicate this scourge: Today, there are about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and it is increasing in every region in the world. In Africa, it is the leading cause of death -- 5,500 Africans die each day from this insidious disease.<br /><br />One effort that is making a difference is <a href="http://www.joinred.com/manifesto.asp">(RED)</a>, a company founded this year by Bono and Bobby Shriver. A percentage of the profits from each (RED) product sold is given to <a href="http://www.joinred.com/globalfund.asp">The Global Fund</a>. We are supporting the (RED) effort by offering promotional support to (RED) and <a href="http://www.joinred.com/products.asp">(RED) products</a> on Google properties throughout the holiday season.<br /><br />We hope you choose to support them with your purchases. Companies offering (RED) products have committed to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of that product into Global Fund-financed AIDS programmes in Africa.<br /><br />Together, let's make a big difference. Read more at <a href="http://www.joinred.com/facts.asp">JoinRED.com</a> or visit the <a href="http://joinred.blogspot.com/">(RED) blog</a>.

Seeing RED

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP You might have noticed from our homepage that today is World AIDS Day . We want to remember all those who have...

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Health care information matters

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President</span><br /><br />At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:<br /><ul><li>What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms</li><li>Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her</li><li>Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred</li></ul>Once she had a correct diagnosis and we'd found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.<br /><br />In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the <a href="http://www.google.com/coop">Google Co-op</a> platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.<br /><br />This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs.<br /><br />Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.<br /><br />As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.<br /><br />These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you. <a href="http://www.google.com/support/health">Read through our Help Center information and let us hear from you.</a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> New contact link.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span>

Health care information matters

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been inte...

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Revisions and publishing features in spreadsheets

<span class="byline-author">Posted by Micah Lemonik, Software Engineer</span><br /><br />Running out for ice cream and cookies at 2 a.m. was just a cliché to me -- until I found myself trying to find an all night grocery store which had these things for my pregnant wife, Marla. Then there were the nights she didn't know what she wanted, but if she didn't get it <span style="font-weight: bold;">now</span>, things would get ugly.<br /><br />How did a <a href="http://docs.google.com/support/spreadsheets/">Google spreadsheet</a> help with pregnant-lady-cravings? She and I started a list of every food she'd ever craved and when, and, using the sharing and collaboration features, we were able to create a spreadsheet that helped me learn what foods were best to keep on hand in bulk for those midnight feedings. We could even keep an inventory so I'd know to stop off at the grocery store on my way home if we were low on vanilla ice cream, cookies or peanut butter.<br /><br />My wife isn't the only one making requests at 2 a.m. Lots of you are sending in lots of requests for features at all hours of the day and night. Two new ones launched today are revisions and and publishing. Revisions will enable you to go back to previous versions of your spreadsheet; publishing will give you a URL for your spreadsheets which you can share with anyone -- even as a link on another site or in your blog. The spreadsheet can still be updated from within Google Docs & Spreadsheets.<br /><br />We've got some other cool new features too, so check them out at <a href="http://docs.google.com/">docs.google.com</a>,and if you have other "crazy" ideas, feel free to <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Suggestions-and-Ideas-Writely?lnk=lr">make suggestions</a>, <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/GoogleDocsSpreadsheets">discuss them with others</a>, or visit the <a href="http://docs.google.com/support">Help Center</a>. Whatever you do, please don't ask for ice cream at 2 a.m.!

Revisions and publishing features in spreadsheets

Posted by Micah Lemonik, Software Engineer Running out for ice cream and cookies at 2 a.m. was just a cliché to me -- until I found myself t...

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