Google retires Google Health and PowerMeter projects

The problems with Google Health are exactly what you said. Put another way, they positioned themselves as an endpoint and made it Everyone Else's Problem to send their medical data into their repository.

Health care providers aren't interested in hiring programmers to send their data into another system for no benefit to them. They have already invested plenty of time and money in EHR systems, and want to get data from all other places (some electronic, some paper) into their own system. And it should go without saying that this needs to be done in a HIPAA compliant way.

Anyway, I'm always interested to talk more about this stuff, feel free to contact me at the email provided in my profile and maybe we can work with your agency.

Engaging the industry is a customer-serving function. I suspect that Google is just not interested in that kind of activity - because if they were, surely they would be better at it.

It almost seems like if a project can't survive by sheer Google brainpower alone, they have no interest in sticking with it.

This has been their M.O. for the news industry -- create some gee-whiz tool on their own or with minimal industry input, and see if it sticks. Sometimes the tool succeeds (second iteration of Google News), oftentimes it addresses a marginal need that no one really cares about (see Living Stories, see http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/) and almost always the tool completely fails to help solve long-term business problems, which is the number one concern of the news industry.

Google is not pulling the plug because of a technical problem with the product (security/HIPAA), but a social issue. You can have the most beautiful API, repository, and website in the world, but it's worthless without any data. Ostensibly Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are "personal health repositories" (PHR's), and live and die based on the content, not the platform.

Health care data has high complexity, lives in heterogenous silos (most of them obsolete), and has a huge variance in quality. Doctors don't understand it (and shouldn't have to), and patients certainly don't. It is certainly plausible for patients to expect that their health info is accessible to them online. With all their prowess, Google could have helped people expose their data. I do this every day with providers.

Google could have built more alliances with care providers (both large and small) and helped get an initial seed of users. They announced some, but not enough. Basically the only things the mainstream media covered about PHR's so far have been their birth, and now death. Nil penetration.

The health care industry needs technical help beyond Obama's stimulus, the existant products are so weak and suffer from so much technical debt...

I actually Google could have done well. They just didn't follow through. Now Dr. Chrono or Practice Fusion are far better positioned.

Google wanted Google Health to totally reshape the health informatics industry. When they say our primary relationship is with the user that's what they really mean. They intended to let people control their own data.

Yes, there are issues with this idea, but there are issues with health record portability as it currently operates.

The forms we have patients fill out in the waiting room are indeed a pain. However, locking them away in a file room prevents 99.9% of the harm a physician can do with medical records: breaching privacy...which you might agree is more than just a "pain" - it has the potential to ruin someone's life.

I think you will find that physicians are much more tech savvy than not, and are likely dealing with issues of trust and privacy that many non-medical people don't fully appreciate. Most physicians rightly will not entrust their patient's data to insecure technology.

The provider told me to drive on over (about 20 miles) and pick up a CD.

I asked if they could upload it to Google Health.

They responded, wat?

So I drove on over.

Similarly, my accountant wanted to see various forms (W2, etc.,) so I put them on Google Docs and shared them with him.

He replied to my email that Google Docs sent him along with the link by asking me if I could email the documents to him.

I said, wat?

So I emailed the documents.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

I was really looking forward to the Google PowerMeter, even email my local power provider, but with no luck.

If I could install such a device in my house, without the need to talk with the utility it would be great.

http://blog.pachube.com/2011/06/how-google-powermeter-got-it...

Edit: I also consider it useful to claim ownership of any of your own sites you link.

lately, most of google's products have come out behind the curve, lacking polish and functionality, and then fail to gain traction and get killed off.

During my interviews at Google I asked a lot of questions, and the answers I got gave me a very scary view of how the place really works.

The search and ads teams work in a magical castle high in the clouds. Almost everything else in the company is considered a fun side project. You are not supposed to think about making money, or being successful. Don't worry about getting users either, that will come as a side effect of being a Google project.

10% of the company accounts for 97% of the revenues ($30+ billion/yr). When you are in the 90% of the company that generates the 3% "other" revenue, its easy to get your project killed, or your engineering staff reassigned, etc. A $100 million dollar a year business unit does not move the needle at all, so you can never be sure of your future.