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Immediately after College, I became fat. I admit it. I'd just accepted a cushy engineering job in Connecticut, my wife was working at a local school we were comfortable and without children. So I became sedentary.

Along came time for my routine physical. After being scanned, weighed, poked and prodded I was told that I was overweight. My first thought was thanks, Sherlock. But what the doctor told me next really surprised me he said that at this rate, if my cholesterol level kept climbing, I would be in the danger zone for heart problems within two or three years. I was only twenty-eight.

Over the next five years, I joined the gym, and eventually dropped thirty-five pounds. We moved back to Maine to live closer to our families and had two children. Life went on.

Along came another routine checkup. The first question the doctor asked was whether I had any preexisting medical conditions. When I mentioned what the doctor told me five years earlier about my cholesterol the doctor asked me to get them to forward my medical records.

I didn't even know where to start. I forgot the name of the doctor and hadn't been there since my last exam years earlier. It took me several hours hunting through boxes of old bills until I finally unearthed the name of the doctor, called the office, and had them snail-mail my medical records to my new doctor. I was shocked to learn that there was no central, easily accessible repository where all medical offices can obtain anyone's medical data. In this case my files were sitting up on a shelf somewhere in a small doctor's office in Connecticut.

* Technical Advances Lead to Google's Central Database *

Google's new Personal Medical Record Service hopes to change all of that and to bring medical records into the digital age. On February 28th, 2008, Google Inc unveiled a plan to store health records for consumers in a password-protected database held on secure Google computers. This "medical services directory" would allow regular patients to import doctor's records from their current doctor, prescription history and test results to their own Google Medical Record account. This way, when patients change doctors or move they continue to have easy access to their own medical records. Only patients would have access to their own Medical Record account, but could potentially provide access to those records to insurers or doctors of their choosing.

Google has already signed deals with several major health insurers and pharmacies such as Aetna, Quest,

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