I was really interested to read John Moore’s post about the irrelevancy of Google Health leading to its demise. It’s a great post that’s worth a read for anyone interested in the PHR space and in particular Google’s participation in healthcare. I’m a little reticent to bet against Google, but the lack of commitment on Google’s part to healthcare says something. I mean, Google has quite a bit going on with cell phones (Android), web browsers (Chrome), and operating systems (Chrome) just to name a few. You can see why Google Health isn’t high on their priority list. Oh yes, and of course they still have to maintain their dominance in search and all the other products they have (gmail, google docs, calendar, etc etc etc).

With that said, some of the most interesting things were found in the comments of Chilmark’s post. Here’s a couple excerpts:

My college health class used car upkeep as a metaphor for how we take care of our health. With my car, I know I should pay more attention to everything: it’d probably run better if I looked at it more, kept up with the latest from my manufacturer (hey, actually read my owner’s manual).
But honestly? I’m just as happy to pay a mechanic to keep track of what I need, when I need it. The money I pay is as much to escape the tedium of keeping up with all that knowledge as it is for the service itself. I’m willing to bet a lot of people feel that way about health: they probably believe they should be involved, but when push comes to shove they’d rather just pay someone else to worry about it.

This rings far too true. We care, but not enough to really care (at least until we really need to care).

I belive what we are seing here is the end of the B2C direction for PHR. John Moore was the 1st to say that PHR is for B2B model. Google designed it’s solution for B2C (login to data through Google). this was wrong. if you see real addade value apps in the market they are offred as B2B under Microsoft HealthVault.

PHR = B2B Very important lesson learned.