Google pulls plug on Google Health

Google has announced that it will cease providing its Google Health online personal health records service on 1 January 2012, due to “limited usage”.

The company said on its official blog that it had taken the decision because Google Health “didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped”, with adoption remaining low after three years.

The announcement confirmed industry rumours that have been circulating for months that Google was set to wind down or close its Google Health venture, which was launched in May 2008.

Critics question the value of an untethered personal health record, like Google Health, that doesn’t link to one or more detailed electronic patient records used by medical professionals to record and manage patient care.

Examples of tethered PHRs, such as Kaiser Permanente’s MyHealth Manager, have proved extremely successful.

Although it was never launched in the UK, in contrast to Microsoft’s HealthVault platform, Google Health proved influential.

It apparently influenced Conservative policy about the potential for personal health records to spur NHS choice and competition, and empower patients to take control of the their own care.

PHRs featured in the Information Revolution consultation paper. It is unclear whether they will feature in the NHS informtion strategy that is now expected in the autumn.

Google said that the goal of Google Health had been “to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information."

It added: “We wanted to translate our successful consumer-centred approach from other domains to healthcare and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users.”

However, the search engine giant said that take up has not been what it hoped: “Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would.”

The blog added: “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.”

Google Health will remain in operation until 1 January 2012 to allow users to download or transfer their data, and data will be available for download for a further year after that. But any data left in January 2013 will be “permanently deleted."

Google says that data can be downloaded from Google Health in a number of ways, including the US industry-standard Continuity of Care Record (CCR) XML record “that can be imported into other personal health tools such as Microsoft HealthVault.”

“Over the coming weeks we’ll also be adding the ability to directly transfer your health data to other services that support the Direct Project protocol, an emerging open standard for efficient health data exchange.”

The post on the official Google blog concludes: “In the end, while we weren’t able to create the impact we wanted with Google Health, we hope it has raised the visibility of the role of the empowered consumer in their own care.”