Oriol Gifra

From last 1th January 2012 Google Health has been discontinued.  This is another failed experiment from Google. Here is the message you can read now.

I think from this one we can learn a lot and from here I thanks Google for that. The official reason why the service has been discontinued was explained in their official blog as follow:

 “Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. 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.”

After running about 4 years only “tech-savvy patients and their caregivers” mostly used it.

For me the most important reasons why the service failed are pointed below:

– Privacy matters, and even more when that information is related to personal health information. It seems Google did not succed in getting enough confidence for many users in relation to the issue of data privacy.

– Early users have found the service difficult to use.

– The service could not overcome the obstacle of requiring people to laboriously put in their own data continuously.

 Beside all those points, for me probably one of the main reasons is that Google did not meet what people probably want to check online regarding health issues.

In my opinion health is and will be a very social topic, in terms of sharing opinions and experiences online. Beside, health information needs to be covered different from any other type of data or information. Health can not be treated as if we were working with sports news or webs. It needs to express confidence, trust, reputation, authority behind the source of that information. Google probably did not have neither those atributes, or at least not enough from my point of view, although its partnering with hospitals and physicians.

Meanwhile, Google has recently announced  another approach to health information through some improvements in its search engine allowing users search for  symptoms and providing information about it causes and treatments.

I think (and it is my personal opinion) patients will appreciate more a P2P relation, which can be Physician to Patient or Patient to Patient as it’s been demonstrated by projects like Patients Like Me or the UK base project Doctors Net