There needs to be at least a hint of political scandal for serious public policy discussions to qualify as news these days. Which is why reports that patients in the UK’s national healthcare system might be granted some some say in managing their personal health records after the next election gets largely lost in discussion of close ties between Google and Britain’s Conservative Party. This is a shame, because public debate over the promises and perils of electronic health record technology are long overdue. ******The tempest concerns Steve Hilton, considered one of Tory party leader David Cameron’s closest aides, who is married to Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice president of global communications. The suggestion in some reports is that these links will make it difficult for the party to include Google in any plan to give citizens the choice of storing their health records with private companies such as Microsoft or top UK private insurer Bupa. Google would have to get busy quick, as currently, its health records service is designed only for the United States. And it has had trouble gaining traction there. As an opposition party, the Conservatives’ views on the subject are relevant because they currently enjoy a wide lead in polls over who might win the next national elections.******Electronic health records could offer broad benefits, if ever implemented.  But many issues must be resolved. The medical profession has long resisted adopting any plan that would help patients second-guess treatment decisions by their physicians. There remain vast problems with how to incorporate old medical records with any degree of accuracy into an electronic record. There are nagging questions about how to create common formats to share all the different types of information that might be included in a health record — from scribbled prescription orders to faxes to database records to X-rays and so on. There are commercial issues over how to balance the interests of patients, medical providers and “payors,” or insurers. Then there is the chicken and egg question of how to get these institutions involved and who will move first. Perhaps the most cripling issue is patient privacy and how to ensure that intitmate personal information is not released. ******In an April speech at the Conservative Party’s spring conference, Cameron spoke of replacing the National Health Service’s (NHS) centralized patient database with a distributed patient health record system that grants some powers to patients to manage their own information. He claims a private plan would “cost virtually noting to run”, in contrast to the Labour government’s £12.7 billion current upgrade of health information systems that does not include measures to give patients more control over their records.***

“People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want. They’re in control, not the state.***And when they’re in control of their own health records, they’re more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS (National Health Service) money.***But best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government’s bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run.”

***Paul Stevenson, a spokesman for the Conservative Party on health policy, confirmed his organisation has commissioned an independent report by the British Computer Society looking at issues involved in implementing a more decentralised approach to electronic patient records. He declined to comment on specifics of the party’s plan, but said a response to the BCS report will be released in a few weeks time. “What the report does look at is how to move to a bottoms-up approach in NHS computing rather than a top-down approach,” Stevenson said.******The public’s attention span is never long for complex medical issues.  Note the relative inattention paid to public health preparations since the global swine flu panic of April. As we head into the silly season of late summer news, expect medical privacy scare stories to reach a fevered pitch.  The near-term prognosis is not good. ******(Images: TheInsider.com; Times Online; Google Health)

 New iPhones, expected next week, are likely to be overshadowed by the triumphal return of Steve Jobs as chief executive of the technology group.

No company and its products are more inseparable from its leader than Apple and Steve Jobs. His obsession with sleek design and an always hard to define “cool factor” has produced an unmatched string of hit computers, music players and, recently, phones.    

Lower prices rather that lots of fancy new features should headline the launch of new iPhone models at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday.

What we do know is that Apple plans to introduce a new version of its software, iPhone 3.0, with 100 new features.

But Apple needs to give iPhone early adopters fresh reasons to buy another iPhone. Two-year contracts users signed when the iPhone was first introduced in June 2007 will begin to expire next month and new models will keep these most loyal of Apple customers happy.

Apple hasn’t said when new iPhone models may be coming. It could concentrate on software announcements it was planning to make and hold off a few for a separate iPhone product announcement. But show-biz is show-biz and Jobs can’t miss the big event.

Look for a higher-capacity phone capable of holding 32-gigabytes of data (10,000 songs, or several feature-length movies). Existing models force users to be more selective about what songs, photos, videos and software they can store in 8- or 16-gigabyte models. The next frontier for the iPhone is a video camera, and on-board video-editing software. Thirty-two gigabytes of memory would allow users to create their own media, as well as storing purchased media. 

Netbook is a remarkably clear and memorable terrm as far as most computer industry jargon goes. Which is why, as with any hot product category, it’s hard for the computer industry to agree on exactly what it means.

Most people who started using the term over the last two years say it refers to a new class of tiny, low-cost, Web-connected computers.  That’s at least what Intel thought when it adopted netbook last year as a generic term.  

For this simple act of clarity, Intel must be punished. The ghost of Psion, the old handheld digital organizer maker, sued Intel for trademark infringement. It turned out Psion trademarked the term as far back as 1996 and sold a line of computers it called netBooks earlier this decade before discontinuing the line.

Microsoft Corp has never much liked the term, in part because the most succcessful early netbooks relied on Linux software rather than Microsoft’s own products. Microsoft is counting on its upcoming Windows 7 operating system to crush Linux-based models.

Just please don’t call them netbooks. This week, a Microsoft executive at the Computex trade show in Taiwan says it wants to abandon the term. Instead, we should all get used to calling netbooks ”low cost small notebook PCs” — LCSNPC for short — when referring to computers capable of doing more than watching Web sites. So says Steven Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s vice president in charge of relations with PC makers, speaking to DigiTimes.

Meanwhile, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t want to be left out of the netbook game. He says there’s no reason Sun Microsystems won’t move into the netbook market, once Oracle completes its planned acquisition of the hardware maker. Of course, to Larry, the netbook is nothing more than the revival of his 1995 vision of the stripped-down “network computer.” I’ll let the Register.com explain the theological differences with yesteryear. 

On a happier note, it turns out Psion Teklogix just wanted a little attention. It recently settled its suit against Intel and released its trademarks on netbook. 

There’s not much news coming out of D7, the Internet executive chat fest, other than that Yahoo’s new CEO is willing to accept “boatloads of money” to sell the company’s Web search business, if Microsoft were willing to pay. They are still talking, sort of. But that is so-o-o last’s year’s story. Move on.

Confererence organizers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are looking to stir up a debate by declaring that the Web 2.0 era of the internet is over and Web 3.0 is underway.  

We think something major is happening at the intersection of tech and media, and we think it deserves its own new hyped-up name: Web 3.0.

Their definition of Web 3.0 centers on the rise of cloud computing and the delivery of a host of Web services to easy to use mobile devices running simple clean software. The iPhone, Blackberry, Google, Twitter. In the absence of news, let’s dredge up an old buzzword.

The death of Web 2.0 doesn’t go down too well with computer publisher Tim O’Reilly, who was the first to comment on the Swisher/Mossberg Web 3.0 declaration: