The Demise of Google Health and Consumer PHR

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.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Intereting comments of PHR being more of B2B play.

    For me that makes sense because any health maintenance works best when you’re forced to do it — Your employer buys PHR service then forcing you to use the PHR to better control its healthcare cost (side effect may be that you feel better). Car maintenance analogy is right on.

    However, I haven’t given up on the B2C path. Especially given the recent purchase of Medfusion by Intuit.

    I’ve tried google health, microsoft healthvault and Kaiser’s patient portal. So far, no “aha” moments.. but I said that about DVD players few years back.

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