As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there’s been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare – Reimbursement. I explain more below regarding why Google Health was doomed to fail in light of the legacy reimbursement model.
First, let’s recap some of the explanations offered up so far. These are all valid but miss the biggest point.
Adam Bosworth, who originally ran Google Health gave one reason - It’s Not Social. That’s true if one wants to create a weight management program or is simply interested in fitness-minded folks. Clearly that is important given the obesity epidemic, however there’s vast swaths of healthcare where being “social” isn’t appropriate or applicable in a doctor-patient relationship. In other words, being social is necessary but not sufficient to transform healthcare. → Read More
After several years languishing in the backwoods of Google’s server farms, Google Health got its plug pulled today. Why did the ambitious project to record your health record online and help you research your every ailment fail? I asked this to Adam Bosworth, the former Googler who originally created Google Health, a few weeks ago when he was in the TCTV studio to talk about his new health startup Keas.
In a sentence, he said, “It’s not social.” In the video clip above, we talk about why Google Health never seemed to go anywhere. Bosworth says the problem was that “Google didn’t push to see what could they do that people would want. They basically offered a place to store date, but people don’t want a place to store data.” → Read More
Google is shutting down Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web. Google says the platform simply wasn’t having the ‘broad impact’ necessary to sustain the product.
From Google’s blog post: There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. → Read More
Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web, is getting a much-needed redesign and feature upgrade today. And Google, which launched Google Health in 2008, has partnered with popular mobile health app CardioTrainer and personal health and wellness monitoring device Fitbit to integrate data from these applications into your Health profile.
Via a new dashboard, Google Health will now organize all of your health and wellness (i.e. fitness) information in one place. The new platform will give provide graphs on your progress with weight loss goals, and you’ll be able to create custom trackers for wellness issues like dietary habits, daily sleep, frequency of exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day. → Read More
Google announced today the addition of two new health insurance companies to its Google Health platform at the Health 2.0 – original naming FTW – event in San Francisco. The fact that the company is touting this addition on its main blog is telling because it cuts to the heart of the product’s main challenge.
You see, Google Health – which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web – can be a great service but it only becomes truly useful when your own health insurer and health care providers sign on to participate, since they are the ones who generate and keep your personal health data.
And flocking to it, they ain’t. → Read More
Whether it be bills, insurance forms, medical records or prescriptions, patients are often inundated with vast quantities of paper. Google Health is now trying to help you organize all of this paperwork in its platform. Google Health, which finally launched last May after months of rumors, has ambitions to become a centralized and secure place to store medical records online.
The new feature lets patients upload scanned paper documents into your Google Health account. Google particularly suggests that you upload an “advance directive,” which determines your end-of-life wishes so that your family and doctor can honor them if you get sick and are unable to communicate. Google Health is actually working with a advance directive provider, Caring Connections, to provide a free, downloadable form customized for all 50 states. In order to complete the form, you need to download it, print it out, complete it, scan it, and upload it back to Google Health. → Read More
Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal.
In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals. → Read More
The slow but steady march towards a unified online healthcare management system continues. Google has announced that it has forged a new partnership with CVS, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains, allowing CVS customers to import their full prescription history into Google Health. CVS joins other major pharmacies including Longs Drugs and Walgreens in offering the same functionality, which combined now allow over 100 million Americans to import their medical histories into Google Health, which launched last May.
It may not sound terribly exciting at first, but the ability to quickly look up a patient’s past and current medications is actually very important in an age when it seems that nearly everyone is on at least one prescription medication. While national pharmacies can typically look up what medications you’ve filled from other branches of their store, they can’t search through the systems of other chains, so they’re forced to rely on the patient to self-report their medical history. → Read More
After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.
The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only. → Read More
Spotted by Google Blogscoped is a login page for Google Health, Google’s entry into the online health records space. At the time of writing the site isn’t allowing logins, but it does include this text: With Google Health, you can: * Build online health profiles that belong to you * Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies * Get personalized health guidance and relevant news * Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services * Share selected information with family or caregivers The other thing to note is the logo (we’ve included it in this post), it would appear that Google Health is going straight to Beta and not through Google Labs. Google Health has been hampered by chronic fatigue syndrome in terms of its development, with the site being rumored to launch originally in May 2006. Microsoft even beat Google in the space, having launched its own online health product in October 2007. → Read More
USA Today’s Kevin Maney thinks Google Health may launch next week based on a comment by Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP Product, during a meeting. Vertical search makes a lot of sense for certain categories, and Health is one of them. Just compare the results for any health related search from Healthline, a well funded new health search site, to a standard search on Google. The question I have is will Google do any content aggregation or even…gasp…original content…to turn their health search site into more of a Google Finance-like portal. Either way, Google Health will need to be very good to be better than Healthline. → Read More
