Google Health Running Out of Steam, According to Experts

I have been a strong advocate for the development of tethered personal health records (PHRs), web-based personal electronic records populated with clinical data from office and hospital EMRs. Two products have emerged as being of major significance: HealthVault from Microsoft and Google Health from Google. The former has been very prominent in the news, announcing partnerships with the Cleveland Clinic (see: HealthVault Experience at Cleveland Clinic Monitoring Patients with Hypertension) and Kaiser Permanente (see: Implications of the Kaiser-Microsoft PHR Deal).

In a lecture that John Moore of Chilmark Research delivered at Lab InfoTech Summit last March (see: What’s Really Going On? or PHRs, Platforms, & Consumer Trends), he described HealthVault as a "thundercloud" (slide 15) and Google Health as a "thin, cirrus cloud" (slide 13). Scott Shreeve who blogs over at Crossover Health, has also commented on the ennui that seems to have enveloped Google Health in the following way (see: CLEAR! Shocking Google Health Back to Life):

It is not like Google couldn’t do some amazing things very fast. I am not just talking about Google Wave style innovation, I mean just their current assets themselves could be reassembled in short order to produce a very useful health care communication platform. They already have gmail, calendering, photos, search, documents, video, chat, and a framework from which to store/retrieve their health information. I think you could build out a mashup in no time that is immediately competitive and would be the leading “groupware” tool available. They also have all their current relationships and the interest of any health care CEO in the country. Ironically, the reference to iGoogle (platform w/widgets of functionality) was mentioned more than once at the Microsoft HealthVault conference. I don’t remember hearing about this at the Google conference – oh, oops – Google doesn’t have a conference. I guess my point is that I love the innovation machine that is Google. I am just profoundly disappointed at what appears to be a lack of commitment by the organization to truly invest and innovate in the health care space. Is it a strategy question? An opportunity cost situation? Why the paralysis?

As one would anticipate, John Moore subsequently weighed in on this topic and reinforced Scott's disappointment with Google Health (see: Is Google Health Irrelevant?)

Without a viable competitor, HealthVault may become complacent and we, the consumer of such services will ultimately pay the price.  Please Google, for the sake of all, at least quintuple the size of Google Health’s team so that it is at least a tenth the size of HealthVault’s.  Maybe then we will begin to see some sign of a viable competitor, a viable platform and a viable choice for the consumer and Google Health will once again become relevant to the market.

I, like Scott and John, am not accustomed to pleading with Google to become more innovative. The company is supposed to be a font of IT innovation. Having entered the PHR market, it seems odd that they are now allowing Microsoft to dominate it. I don't know what's going on but do have a couple of questions. Are PHRs too far from Google's core expertise? Are they questioning whether the PHR business model will be sufficiently remunerative for the company? This latter concern has never stood in the way of new Google business initiatives in the past.

Comments

[Mark Terry]

In mid-2008 I wrote a white paper on PHRs, which can be found here:http://www.g2reports.com/issues/advisory/advisory/mark_terry/345-1.html

It's not so much that there aren't viable competitors to Microsoft, but none of them have that kind of name recognition and brand. It is disheartening that Google seems to be faltering, though, because they do in fact seem to usually be ahead of the curve in terms of innovation.