More on Google’s Partnership with Cleveland Clinic

I was in the midst of the great towers of GE, Cerner, Microsoft, and the other glittering HIMSS palaces and there was one player out of place: Google.

It had such a modest footprint and has been so quiet about the partnership with Cleveland Clinic, you’d never know they launched a major initiative. There were no banners advertising Google was even at the show, nevermind they were entering the PHR space.

But I can tell you one thing: from my unofficial poll, PHR vendors seemed a lot more concerned about Google than they did about Microsoft’s Health Vault. (”Health Vault is just a place to store stuff,” is what was more or less repeated back to me — which is more or less the official party line.)

In show full of massive overstatement — I know of several companies in the financial dumps who made significant booth investments — Google’s presence was, for a soon-to-be major player, oddly understated.