Google is shutting down Google Health, which enables you to store and manage all your health information in one place on the Web. Google says the platform simply wasn’t having the ‘broad impact’ necessary to sustain the product.
From Google’s blog post: There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service.
Google says that it will continue to operate Google Health until January 1, 2012, will allow people to export their health data for an additional year beyond that. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point (January 2013) will be permanently deleted.
Google Health launched in 2008 as a central repository for all of your health information, including prescriptions, medical history, medical records, and more.
One of the key contributors to the overall success of Google Health were partnerships with insurance companies, hospitals and other medical institutions to make data more available to consumers. As last year, Google Health still needed to sign up hundreds of insurers in the U.S. Google announced some key deals (i.e. a partnership with CVS to import prescription data into the platform), but couldn’t gain traction elsewhere.
Google also started transitioning Health into an overall wellness platform, allowing users integrate data from FitBit and CardioTrainer, but clearly this didn’t get enough traction amongst users.
Microsoft’s competing product HealthVault looks to be still alive and kicking.
