Has Google (NSDQ: GOOG) been saying one thing and doing another when it comes to electronic health records? Consumer Watchdog presented lobbying records Tuesday that it says show that the internet giant may have pushed Congress to permit the sale of electronic medical records even though the company has said it did not.

“From a policy perspective, we oppose the sale of medical information in the health care industry,” Google Senior Policy Counsel Pablo Chavez said back in January when Consumer Watchdog first made the charges.

Electronic health records are becoming a hot-button issue for privacy advocates, who are concerned that as the storage of medical records moves from doctors’ offices to the web, safeguards around patient information may fall away.

Selling medical records would obviously be a public-relations disaster for Google, which is trying to get consumers to adopt its Google Health electronic health records platform. At the same time, Google—and rival Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)—probably have an interest in avoiding some of the regulations that have dictated the handling of electronic medical records by healthcare providers.

A Google spokeswoman calls the Consumer Watchdog charges “baseless,” stating that the company had not lobbied in order to get excluded from a law which set standards for the electronic transfer of health data. “Although Google — unlike a health care provider — is not covered by (the law), we have in place strict data security policies and measures, and ensure that users control access to their information,” the spokeswoman said. She added that the company had lobbied Congress to support national standards for health information exchange and to protect consumer privacy.

—Google Health Travails Google also responded Monday to the story of a patient whose medical conditions had been misidentified by Google Health after he imported his records into the platform. Google said the problem came about because the descriptions of the ailments imported into the platform were based on the billing codes used by the hospital to bill the patient’s insurance company and not “free text descriptions” entered by doctors. In Boston, where the patient’s hospital was located, Google said it would end that practice.

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