How a Broken Medical System Killed Google Health

At the tip of this year, Google Health can flatline. The service could not encourage many folks to import or analyze their health knowledge, and specialists say its untimely death is, in many ways, an extension of U.S. health-care providers' failure to share knowledge across establishments, or create it simple for patients to get it.

Google's free on-line service lets folks upload, store, analyze, and share their health data. however there are many totally different health-care establishments within the U.S. that use totally different systems to record and store knowledge, and lots of doctors do not use electronic records in any respect, creating the task of retrieving and updating knowledge extraordinarily troublesome for the typical person, says Isaac Kohane, who directs the informatics program at Children's Hospital in Boston, and codirects Harvard Medical School's Center for Biomedical Informatics.

For Google to form its service enticing, it might have had to unravel this health IT mess, that is within the early stages of being addressed through recent national policy moves. These embody 2009 federal stimulus incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic medical records, and for hospitals to share knowledge with each other.

Kohane says it'll be a minimum of 5 years before knowledge flows smoothly enough to form one thing like Google Health worthwhile. "Google is unwilling, for perfectly sensible business reasons, to have interaction in block-by-block market solutions to health-care establishments one by one," Kohane says, "and expecting patients to truly do knowledge entry isn't a scalable and workable answer."

Google did forge some partnerships—including one with the insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield—that let patients upload insurance billing and medical data into its service a lot of simply. Even so, the user expertise was uneven, as Technology Review described in 2009. Some patients, for instance, would wish to get copies of their records and then manually enter all the knowledge.

Google announced on its blog late last week that Google Health would be canceled as of January one, 2012. Users will retrieve their knowledge for an extra year, however subsequently, the info are going to be deleted.

Other, similar services survive. outstanding among them is Microsoft's HealthVault. Microsoft was fast to announce ways in which Google Health users may move their knowledge over to HealthVault. during a blog spelling out this method, Sean Nolan, chief architect and general manager of Microsoft's health solutions cluster, conjointly said "the solely thanks to fix health care is to consumerize it," and added that "we'll get there, and Google Health moved the ball forward."

Some restricted health knowledge exchanges among hospitals and different health-care suppliers are cropping up round the u. s., however immediately, there isn't any demand for full sharing. "There continues to be no flow," Kohane says. "There still has got to be further cultural shifts to truly create the knowledge flow."

Through 2019, up to $36 billion may be spent below the federal stimulus for adoption and meaningful use of electronic medical records. (The final federal outlay—taking into consideration expected savings and income from penalties for failure to adopt the records—is projected to be $19.6 billion.) "The investment has been committed, however plenty of the money has not been spent however, and that we can see within the next few years whether or not it'll happen or not," Kohane adds.

But Google is not waiting to search out out.