Google Health

» see google.com/health as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google health did not really cross out of the us. its plumbing assumed an american healthcare system, where labs bill in dollars and electronic medical records are something patients have to fight to copy. in turkey the social security system already held your prescription history. there was no analog for the problem google health was solving.

the product launched on 20 may '08. cleveland clinic ran the first pilot with 1,600 patients. beth israel deaconess, cvs caremark, walgreens, quest diagnostics all integrated. you could enter conditions, medications, allergies, lab results by hand or import them through partner apis. the privacy model was opt-in per record.

the reason it died was structural. healthy people do not want to maintain a personal health record, sick people already have a chart at the hospital they go to. nobody on the provider side accepts patient-entered data as authoritative. the only people who would patiently keep a google health profile up to date were the ones with the time and patience to manage it manually, and that demographic does not scale to a google product.

google announced the shutdown on 24 june '11 with service end set for 1 january '12 and the data export window running through 1 january '13. the team did not get reassigned to anything visible. roni zeiger, the chief health strategist, left google in '12. the product did not get a successor inside google for six years.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it tried to be ~

the pitch was a personal health record under your own google account. you would collect lab results and prescription history from partner systems, then add your own typed notes between them. you could grant time-limited access to a doctor or specialist. the data lived on google servers under hipaa-style controls and a granular privacy ui.

the comparison product was microsoft healthvault (in inventory as microsoft-healthvault), which launched eight months earlier in october '07. healthvault used the same playbook from the opposite direction: microsoft built the api standard, signed up provider integrations, then waited. it took twelve more years for healthvault to admit the same thing google admitted in '11. neither company found a market that was not already covered by the hospital chart.

~ the second life ~

google relaunched google health in '18 as a project rather than a consumer service. the new version was a research and engineering group inside alphabet working on ml for medical imaging and electronic medical record search, paired with the verily life sciences spinoff. there was no consumer product underneath. the '08 model had not come back.

in '21 google reorganized health again, dispersing the team across fitbit and other groups. the brand survives but no consumer-facing product carries the original google health idea forward. microsoft healthvault, the most direct competitor, shut on 20 november '19 with the same lack-of-adoption explanation. the personal-health-record category as a consumer product is closed.

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