Tag Archives: Google Health

Did Google Health Die? Or was it killed and Became a Martyr of the PHR Revolution

Posted on by
The defining characteristic of the new PHR platforms is that they let patients import their health records (Step 1, Figure 2) from a number of healthcare organizations, including hospitals and pharmacies, and enable them to use their health information for better self-management through third-party applications. In essence, the PHR platforms are analogous to the iPhone platform, which has extended the utility of the phone by its vast collection of useful third-party applications. Similarly, patients can choose to add a third-party PHR application to their PHR accounts (Step 2, Figure 2) and then give consent to the application to reuse the data within their PHRs, so that the application can provide some personalized and useful services to the patients (Steps 2 and 3, Figure 2). The provision in these PHR platforms to enable patients to control “what they can do with their health information and who they can share the information with” has been described as a “tectonic shift in the health information economy.”14 It can be envisioned that patients may want to use their record for a variety of purposes. For instance, patients may add an application that provides them reminders for different vaccines or preventive screening tests based on their health profiles, or one that helps them find clinical trials that match their health profile and express an interest in enrolling in them. The latter usage scenario can create a new scale of data liquidity, by moving information from hundreds of hospital clinical databases into PHR platforms and into applications that match patients to clinical trials (Steps 2 and 3, Figure 2).

The martyr: Google Health Primary Cause of Demise: Human/Organizational factors such as ‘Control (and fear of loss) of patient Data’ the main cause of Google health’s early death (and of many other HIT products) The Big Announcement: Google Health to shut down Over the last few days there has been considerable discussion in the blogosphere [...]

RIP Google Health. A Heartful Retrospect from an App Developer.

Posted on by

Last friday Google announced that it will discontinue its Google Health product. Although, it did not come as a big surprise to most people in the online health space, I’m personally saddened with this announcement because we started about the same time as Google Health and we were one of the first 10 apps to [...]