Google Health Flatlines

By Ken Congdon, editor in chief, Health IT Outcomes

Rumors of the expected demise of Google Health have been circulating for months now, and these allegations were finally validated in a press announcement released by Google on June 24. According to the company, the public site will shut down on January 1, 2012 and active users of Google Health will be able to download their health data for an additional year beyond that. Launched in 2008, Google Health was an ambitious venture geared toward providing people with unprecedented access and control over their own personal health data. There were only two problems: 1) people weren't engaged; and 2) the health IT infrastructure wasn't in place to support the initiative.

Outside of a handful of tech-savvy patients, their caregivers, and wellness and fitness enthusiasts, nobody used Google Health, and it's difficult to support a service with such a limited user base. There are several reasons why Google Health didn't gain the widespread adoption it expected. The first has to do with the fragmented health IT infrastructure currently in place in the U.S. One can't easily aggregate personal health data from multiple hospitals, practices, clinics, labs, and imaging centers (the way Google intended) using the health IT infrastructure in place today. However, I believe this obstacle will soon be eliminated as healthcare facilities throughout the U.S. are being motivated by the federal government to adopt EHRs and other means of electronically exchanging health data among providers and payers by 2014. This motivation is, of course, coming in the form of Medicare EHR meaningful use incentive payments and penalties.

A second reason for the lack of adoption of Google Health involves cultural change, and it may prove to be more difficult to overcome than the IT infrastructure hurdles. Google Health asked patients, for the first time ever, to be active participants in managing their health record. Not only was this concept, in and of itself, foreign to patients, but Google also asked patients to leverage a technology service to manage this process. This only compounded the fear factor for technology-averse elderly patients (a large portion of the patient base for many healthcare providers). My 82-year-old grandmother (who passed last year) didn't even own a computer and had no idea what Google was. Heck, she never even drove a car and had trouble balancing her checkbook. Asking her to manage her health record using a computer service would have been like asking me to split the atom.

However, this point leads me to another. To even experience a fear of change, one has to know that the opportunity or potential for change exists. This was potentially the biggest downfall of Google Health — few people knew what it was or that it even existed. The lack of awareness was a direct result of Google Health not gaining the support of the physician community. Think about it. Most changes to our health behavior as patients — whether it's to quit smoking, to eat better, or to get more exercise — are a direct result of advice or recommendations given to us by our doctors. For Google Health, or any PHR (personal health record) to succeed, the physician community will need to play a large role. They will need to advise and encourage patients to use PHRs and coach them through the transition. In turn, physicians will need to be provided with the proper motivation and incentives to encourage their patients to leverage PHRs.

So, does the collapse of Google Health spell doom for the PHR concept as a whole? I don't think so. In fact, in many ways I feel Google Health was ahead of its time. New PHR services (perhaps even future iterations from Google) will learn from the mistakes made by Google Health and be more in tune with industry readiness for the technology. At the same time, the health IT infrastructure will continue to become more integrated, while more tech-savvy baby boomers become the elderly patients treated by providers. In the end, however, success of any PHR initiative will require the technology provider, the physicians, and the patients to all work together.

Have a comment or feedback for Ken on this article? He can be reached directly at ken.congdon@jamesonpublishing.com.