Today the search sovereign announced a pilot program with the Cleveland Clinic that will enable the health-care organization’s patients to store their health records in their Google Accounts. The clinic plans to enroll up to 10,000 patients in the program, which will allow them to securely port their medical records to their Google profiles, where they can be more easily managed and shared with doctors, labs and the like.

Of course, by making such records easier to share with medical providers, Google may be making them easier to “share” with less well-intentioned entities. Health insurance carriers. Potential employers. Online marketers. The government.

Google, too.

As the World Privacy Forum pointed out yesterday, companies like Google are not governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA. “Don’t assume your medical records are protected no matter where they are: HIPAA privacy protections generally do not follow the health-care files,” the WPF warned. “HIPAA’s protections generally do not ‘travel’ with or follow a medical record that is disclosed to a third party outside the health-care treatment and payment system. … After you have disclosed your health care information to a PHR (Personal Health Records) outside the privacy protections of the health care system (HIPAA), your information can be used or redisclosed by the PHR in ways that would not be permitted for the same information if held by your doctor or health plan. Depending on the applicable privacy policy, health records outside of HIPAA can potentially be bought and sold, shared with merchants, and even disclosed to employers.”

It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities–reliable, unambiguous, computable medical data and safe systems for trust and authentication and controlled access–will dovetail with the consumer needs for discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being treated and how they will manage their diseases or recovery, this consumer awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data and, inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.”

–Former Google VP Adam Bosworth, Google Health architect

Google’s mission, as you’ve likely heard, is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. And let’s face it: in what area of our lives is the world’s information more disorganized, inaccessible and useless than health care?

It’s nice to hear, then, that Google’s long-expected health initiative is set to go live in early 2008. Noting the incredible rate at which the health industry generates data (two billion X-rays per year, 200 petabytes of data), Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Google is developing a prototype online platform that will organize it. “If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health-care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”

Beyond that, Mayer had little else to offer but a schtick-in-need-of-a-laugh-track “Top 10 List of Things You Might See From Google Health.” Among them, Google paternity search, Viagra spam for Gmail users who truly need it, and an “I’m feeling yucky” button.