On the 24th of June 2011, Google officially announced that it was abandoning the Google Health platform, an electronic health record project that many organizations had adopted for their workers and associates. Three years had passed since its public launch (2008) and it had been 5 years since the first tests (2006), and we were all asking ourselves the same question: why? The competition has already begun to lure Google Health users with Microsoft offering to transfer the information to its Microsoft Health Vault platform. And yet, it is very telling that Google would abandon a project that had caused such a big splash. Google Health was attempting to take advantage of a gap in the market by offering something that every healthcare and internet expert was asking for or proposing: the opportunity to exchange healthcare information and make that information accessible at any given moment. Logically, the ultimate objective, from a commercial point of view was twofold: (1) for large corporations, insurers and even hospitals to subcontract their electronic health services to Google; (2) to try to glean some benefit from users’ healthcare data. What happened? Companies preferred to develop their own system and patients trusted websites such as Patients Like Me or Cure Together more. Maybe there was an error in the business plan? Did Google not know where to place its product in the market? Citizens are wary about entrusting their information to large companies and prefer to wait for their healthcare service provider to provide them with a system. Other people criticized the closed nature of the platform and suggested that if it were an open-source platform, Google Health’s fate might have been different. Some articles even came out and said: «trusting proprietary health software vendors or services with critical health data is a bad idea». Maybe Google had the model right but were ahead of their time and couldn’t win the trust of the public. They did get information but what could they do with it? Furthermore, the healthcare system in the USA isn’t exactly a favorable environment for starting a discussion about data sharing; the fact is that with healthcare providers so fragmented the idea that their systems might ‘talk’ hasn’t even been countenanced. The Harvard Business Review blog noted the ‘un-2.0’ nature of Google Health, which is especially strange for a company like Google. In their entry «What Google’s Quiet Failure Says About Its Innovation Health», they say it loud and clear: “Simply put, Google Health was never a true Web 2.0 application. Google Health didn’t get better the more people used it. Google didn’t get smarter every time someone made a link or search. Google certainly didn’t ‘immediately act on that information’ to improve the Google Health user experiences. The real heart of Google Health certainly wasn’t a harnessing or harvesting of ‘collective intelligence.’” Google must not have understood that if people share their healthcare data, they want to get something out of it, but Google Health didn’t offer anything. There were no visualizations, no graphics, not even the possibility of connecting with other people with the same disease (along the lines of Patients Like Me), forums to learn more, or added value information. This was a good idea poorly developed in a business they didn’t understand. No doubt, they’ll be trying again soon…. Blog: saludconcosas.blogspot.com
