Google Health And SureScripts

I’m just catching up with this announcement from a few weeks ago. Google Health has added Surescripts to their partner list. This is interesting to me on a few fronts.

1 – Can this solve the portability issue? Today, if you change employers, your prescription history gets reset. If your employer changes health plans or PBMs, your prescription history gets reset. While this isn’t always a major issue, that history is important both for a DUR (i.e., drug-drug interaction) perspective but also from a research perspective (e.g., Medication Possession Ratio).

2 – Google is going to message users about potential DUR issues. That is a big value proposition of the PBMs. Given the other threats to their business model ($4 generics, direct-to-consumer mail order, claims administrators, legislation, pharmacy to employer contracting), is this another issue?