Google announced on Wednesday that it's no longer developing Google Wave, its Web application for real-time communication and collaboration, as a standalone product. It's unclear if this will impact whether the company continues to develop the idea of using the Google Wave Protocol to represent individuals' health records.
Google Wave, which is a Web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking, was only released to the general public in May.
But the "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” wrote Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, operations and Google fellow, on the company’s blog Wednesday.
Google engineers Shirley Gaw and Umesh Shankar, meanwhile, have written a paper called “Using the Wave Protocol to Represent Individuals’ Health Records,” which they plan to present next week during the HealthSec ’10 workshop, which is being held in Washington.
The authors make the argument that, "standards for exchanging medical records data, such as Continuity of Care Record (CCR) and the Continuity of Care Document (CCD), tend to focus on representing particular clinical data as some subset of a patient’s complete record. This provides a snapshot of its state, but there is very little to describe how a sequence of changes to the record should be interpreted as a coherent whole, nor is there a nice way to incorporate corrections or notes from the patient.”
The solution?
"There is something available now that gives us the data aggregation, conflict resolution, and audit trail that what we want: the Google Wave federation protocol. It’s built from the ground up to collate multiple sources into a coherent whole," Gaw and Umesh write.
Hölzle says that the company will maintain the site through the end of the year and will “extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”
Whether or not electronic health records is one of them remains to be seen.
