The leaders of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are unique (in a technological sense) in a couple of ways. Firstly, the president/CEO blogs, and uses his blog to try to increase transparency at his and other hospitals when it comes to touchy subjects like medical errors.

Secondly, one of his deputies, the chief information officer, John Halamka, apparently has a radio frequency ID (RFID) chip embedded in his body so that his medical records can be read by simply holding a reader up to the chip. He and others in Massachusetts are exploring ways to better use electronic health records across the state.

More recently, the Boston Globe’s healthcare blog says he’s been named to a Google advisory board focused on health care issues. Here’s an excerpt from Google’s announcement:

Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.

I wonder what this means: is Google working on a search engine for health records?