The always insightful John Moore (so many great John’s in Healthcare IT), posted a great blog post back in September of 2010 about Google Health hitting the reset button. The post was interesting as it tried to show Google Health going in a new direction. The irony was that almost a year ago John had posted about Google Health’s irrelevancy in the PHR market.
Despite the up downs of Google Health, today John put Google Health in Stasis. He sights a great list of yellow and dark orange flags that are a bad sign for those who love Google Health. Here’s one section from his post:
Beginning in late March 2011, we started hearing the rumors of the impending demise of Google Health once again (is this becoming some sort of annual thing with Google Health?). We waited a few weeks to see if the rumors would die down, they did not. We put a call into Google Health to set up a briefing, get an update. Response back was slow (one yellow flag). When they did get back to us, they said it will be at least a couple of weeks (two yellow flags). Next, our Google contact told us by email that they were going to hand Chilmark’s inquiry off to Google’s PR department (screaming dark orange flag). And now today, we received an email from one of Google Health’s most visible spokespersons, Missy Krasner that she is leaving Google.
He then projected that we shouldn’t “expect anything new out of Google Health for at least the next 5 years.” That’s quite the projection. However, I’d take it one step further. I don’t expect to see anything really mainstream out of PHR software for another 5 years either.
I do think that PHR software is going to have a strong showing in chronic patients. I could also see an interesting niche in secondary caretaker healthcare management using a PHR (I’ve got an interesting announcement about baby boomer healthcare coming soon). I definitely want an online means for tracking my parents healthcare. Not to mention, then all of my brothers and sisters could participate as well. A few other niches are likely to be successful as well. Not to mention, other consumer PHR-like applications for healthcare that will become popular like the Nike+.
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