Vince Kuratis, who knows rather more than he should about DM and eHealth, and maybe knows rather too much to be as optimistic as he is—given all that he knows—has a long and excellent article on Connecting the Dots…Google Health Promises to Create AND Dominate Next Generation PHRs.

Briefly Vince’s analysis is that Google Health will allow a personal URL that will be a place that a consumer can store data from all over the health system and link it to their own “soft” data such as Google searches, and then run applications over the top—presumably to do things like diagnose diseases.

You should go read Vince’s analysis, which is pretty close to my own, and irons out a lot of the details.

The only way that I’d differ from Vince (other than I was too lazy to write mine out fully) is that that I’d add in the one interesting VC investment Google has made. It’s in 23andme. Aside from the fact that the CEO is Larry or Sergey (I can’t tell those two apart)’s wife—bet that made the pitch easier!— and that Esther Dyson has her hooks into it as well, the interesting thing about 23andme is that it’s a genetic testing company. And it seems pretty logical that genetic information is going to be mixed into PHRs in the near future….so it doesn’t take a rocket genome scientist to make the link between 23andme and the not yet unveiled Google PHR/personal health URL.

They key question is whether Google (and more importantly American consumers using Google as a vehicle) has the clout to make the health care system willingly and easily give up its data….

We shall see.