A statement from the WHIT Congress described Bosworth as Google’s former vice president of product management. Upon departing Google, Bosworth had been heading up the search advertising company’s Google Health project, now within the purview of Marissa Mayer.

It seems that Bosworth will recycle a speech he presented at Google’s New York operation in January 2007. He discussed why AJAX failed when first introduced in a speech titled ”Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn’t in Software and Why.”

Substitute “Healthcare” for “Software” and that’s the gist of Bosworth’s upcoming keynote.

”Adam is one of the most insightful, engaging and thought-provoking leaders in the technology field. We are all eager to have him share his unique perspective on improving healthcare before a healthcare technology audience,” Megan Antonelli, Executive Director of World Congress’s Technology Sector, said in the statement.

Bosworth does have an extensive techie pedigree, having worked on developing XML; the Microsoft database product known to Office users as Access; and BEA’s WebLogic. His blog posting has been far less active, with his last post appearing on October 5th.

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Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land scored a tip that Bosworth had extended his vacation from Google to a permanent one. That was later confirmed to him by Google:

Adam is a great talent and was instrumental in starting Google Health. He is now on vacation and has decided to pursue other opportunities after that. Marissa Mayer is taking over the health team in the interim until a new team leader takes over. Google is moving forward with work on our health products.

Though the money at stake from ads Google could deliver alongside a dedicated and in-depth health solution should be worth millions, Google has likely run into a fundamental problem with health information. Laws like HIPAA make the sharing of medical information difficult, and rightly so, due to privacy concerns.

That would explain why Google Health has been little more than tagged search and a set of screenshots leaked on the Internet. Google is going to need more time, and another leader, to do more with healthcare than it does today.

Healthy Thoughts From Google

It is straight out of Google’s modus operandi for information these days: find it, organize it, make it personally relevant. The company would like to see the health care industry treat information in a similar fashion over the next decade.

Google VP Adam Bosworth spoke at the 2007 American Medical Association of Informatics (AMIA) Spring Congress about this topic. His talk focused on three main principles of making health information more effectively available:

• Discovery – Consumers should be able to discover the most relevant health information possible

• Action – Consumers should have direct access to personalized services to help them get the best and most convenient possible health support
• Community – Consumers should be able to learn from and educate those in similar health circumstances and from their health practitioners

Fulfilling that vision requires “two core changes in electronic medicine,” Bosworth said in his talk. Health data needs to be computable, a change that should happen with the advent of forthcoming standards for doing so.

Authentication and trust form the other issue. Unsurprisingly, it’s an area where Bosworth said Google can help (emphasis added):

We face this issue every day. For example, people want to expose one of their Google calendars to some time management service or to Salesforce.com, but not all their calendars, let alone their email, their personal Google Documents (spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations) or their other personal data. Thus, giving up their user name and password to the service is totally inappropriate.

And it is important that not only are access rights constrained, but that they can be revoked because the customer may end up losing trust in the individual or online service with whom the data is shared. To us, trust does not mean a national identity since as far as we can see this flies in the face of the very human need to compartmentalize and maintain privacy.

We have come up and are shipping a solution known as Account Authentication Proxy for Web-Based Applications, also known as Auth/Sub. For more information see http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/AuthForWebApps.html.

In short, Bosworth is saying trust Google to help with this, and not the government.