An ugly metric, and one that’s likely to grow worse in coming months. Challenger says job cuts have risen five straight quarters. What’s to stop them rising for a sixth? No idea.

“Unfortunately, no industry appears to be immune in this recession,” CEO John Challenger said in a statement. “Even the health care sector, which has consistently added jobs throughout the downturn, is starting to see those gains shrink.” That said, the firm doesn’t see things getting as grim as they did in the 2001 recession. At that time employers announced an average of 145,467 total job cuts each quarter. With only 84,217 cuts announced in the most recent quarter, we’ve still got quite a way to go before we hit that number. Course, we’re also off to a great start…

“We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet,” Managing Partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris explained in a blog post. “Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.”

Presumably, then, the scope of the fund’s investments will be as diverse and, ahem, fascinating as the whims of Google’s leadership. Which isn’t always a good thing. That said, Google Ventures may do much to help the company innovate itself out of this downturn and perhaps even spot and engulf the next Google (GOOG) killer before it has a chance to live up to its namesake. As Google Ventures explains in its FAQ, it’s not above engulfing a company it’s incubated. “Acquisitions by Google of portfolio companies are possible, but this is not the goal or focus of our investment activities. Our focus is building great companies and generating long term financial return.”

Obviously. But for Google, right?

[Image Credit: Ignorance Is Futile!]

And it’s almost certain to do just that, judging from Relsys’s pedigree. The company has been around for some 20 years and it counts 21 of the top 50 pharma companies among its customers. As Redmonk analyst James Governor notes, this is a savvy acquisition and one that positions Oracle well to take advantage of future Obama administration health care spending. “Oracle didn’t get to where it is today without knowing which way the wind is blowing, and it’s not exactly hard right now to know where the rest of the US Government’s money will go, after its blown most of its wad on financial services bailouts,” Governor said. “Healthcare and Utilities are both set for significant investment. Oracle was already in healthcare, but the Relsys acquisition takes it to the heart of concerns around drug provenance and compliance. Regulatory compliance remains one of the best ways to sell software–nobody wants to do it, but everyone has to. It’s like flossing your teeth–if you could license an application to do that for you, you would, right?”

According to a new study of coffee drinking, people who drink several cups of coffee every day are less likely to die of heart disease than those don’t. The study, one of the largest and longest on the subject, tracked 129,000 men and women for between 18 and 24 years and found that men who drank more than five cups of coffee a day were 44% less likely to die of heart disease. Women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die. “Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption has several beneficial health effects,” explained Esther Lopez-Garcia, lead author of the Harvard School of Public Health report. “The more coffee you drink, the less risk of mortality you have.”

[Image credit: Shannon Wheeler]

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.”

Google’s informal motto is “Don’t be evil,” but a more apt one might be “don’t be stupid”–at least for the company’s advertising department. In a blog posting this weekend, Lauren Turner, an account planner in Google Health, suggested the health-care industry consider using Google’s ad platform to do battle with “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s scathing indicitment of the U.S. health-care system. “Moore attacks health insurers, health providers and pharmaceutical companies by connecting them to isolated and emotional stories of the system at its worst,” Turner wrote in a post titled “Does negative press make you Sicko?” “Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show health care’s interest in patient well-being and care.”

“Moore’s film portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show health care’s interest in patient well-being and care.” Wow. Since when does Google’s Health Advertising Blog do movie reviews? And how do the folks operating it even have time for such things when they’re so busy providing strategic advertising advice to the health-care industry? “We can place text ads, video ads and rich-media ads in paid search results or in relevant Web sites within our ever-expanding content network,” Turner continued. “Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.”

Ah. So not only is Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, it’s to act as an ad agency for Big Pharma and health care. To be fair, Turner later penned a follow-up post noting that the opinion she expressed about “Sicko” was her own and not Google’s–even though it was prominently posted to one of the company’s corporate blogs. “Advertising is an effective medium for handling challenges that a company or industry might have,” Turner explained. “You could even argue that it’s especially appropriate for a public-policy issue like health care. Whether the health-care industry wants to rebut charges in Mr. Moore’s movie, or whether Mr. Moore wants to challenge the health-care industry, advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue. That is Google’s opinion, and it’s unrelated to whether we support, oppose or (more likely) don’t have an official position on an issue.”

I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people, as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that. I do well enough already, and I made this film because I want the world to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening. Is it wrong for someone who’s bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it’s not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared.”

–Michael Moore, 2004

Good thing Michael Moore has a lenient attitude toward file-sharing, otherwise the leak of a pristine copy of his new documentary, “Sicko,” to the Internet–two weeks before its June 29 release–might chafe a bit. Certainly, it’s got to be vexing to the film’s distributors, Weinstein Co. and Lionsgate, that moviegoers interested in seeing Moore’s U.S. health-care exposé can find it pretty easily not just on torrent indexes, but on YouTube as well.

That said, they did their best to spin the leak in a positive light. “We are responding aggressively to protect our film … but from our research it is clear that people interested in the [health-care] movement are excited to go to the theater so they can be part of the experience and fight to reform health care,” Weinstein Co. spokeswoman Sarah Rothman said in a statement. “Health care impacts everybody right in their homes, and it is not surprising that people are eager to see ‘Sicko.’ “

Not at all. I’d guess it’d be about as surprising as how difficult it might be to persuade the public to go buy tickets to see a film that’s available free on the Internet …