Google has announced plans to “retire” Google Health in January 2012. It’s a blow to those in the healthcare business who had big ideas for using Google Health as the basis of a “global patient record” and who adopted the Google health record as the model for this.
In 2007, at the launch of Google Health, Google stated: “By digitizing health records and giving control over them to the patients, they will be able to make better informed decisions. With health records stored in a central server, patients will be able to access them from anywhere, whether they move to a new city or are traveling while on vacation, so that, in an emergency, unfamiliar health care providers can get a comprehensive view of their health history” (Source: ABC news - Google Moving Forward on Health Initiative).
In withdrawing the system, Google says that Google Health “didn't scale as we had hoped.... we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would”
So, what has driven Google to abandon Google Health and is there a message here for the concept of the “global health record” for the healthcare sector?
Here are some of the factors that have been put forward for the failure of Google Health:
So does Google Health’s demise open the door for Microsoft’s HealthVault? We can only wait and see.
For additional perspectives on why Google Health died a death: