Google Health in Cleveland

Google wants to manage your health information starting in Cleveland:

The Cleveland Clinic has more than 100,000 patients and many of those are retirees who spend some of the year elsewhere such as Arizona and Florida. And when they go, their medical records don’t follow says Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

The Google personal health record Harris says is a solution to that problem, among others. A person can approve the transfer of information on medical conditions, allergies, medications and laboratory results from the clinic’s computers to a Google personal health record.

Is this Google move into personal health from public search a good omen or a harbinger of bad things to come?

Do people understand what it means to give Google access to their health records?

What other unapproved entities will have access to that information beyond a personal care physician and Google itself?

What restrictions are in place to protect people from having their healthcare hacked and used against them in public or in private blackmail?