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Google is unveiling a new personal health records service, Google Health

Ten years ago, a similar product might have saved me some serious heartache. I was ambulanced to an emergency room with chest pains, and the cardiologist on call diagnosed me as having a heart attack. Not quite. If she had been able to access my medical history, she might have seen that my father had had an aortic aneurysm and checked for that. Instead, she put me on blood thinner, causing my aneurysm to bleed all the more and almost bringing my brilliant career, among other things, to an untimely end. Thanks to a surgeon-god named Paul Corso and a St. Jude's valve, I survived.