3 ms·

I can't speak to PowerMeter but on Google Health they have no one to blame but themselves. I desperately wanted to employ it here (I work for an agency that ta

I can't speak to PowerMeter but on Google Health they have no one to blame but themselves. I desperately wanted to employ it here (I work for an agency that takes in abused children and had envisioned putting the kids records into Google Health so they would start out being able to carry their records wherever they go). But after just an hour of research I'd already identified over 20 serious issues that could open us up to major liability claims. To give just one example. This is from Google's own Google health page... "Unlike a doctor or health plan, Google Health is not regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal law that establishes data confidentiality standards for patient health information. This is because Google does not store data on behalf of health care providers. Instead, our primary relationship is with the user." Well...ok...but then how are health care providers supposed to put information in for their clients? The whole point of this is for the patient to carry around accurate information. But if the Doctor has to trust the patient will put the information in themselves there's no way to guarantee all the information will be put in correctly. Meaning the records could be more harm than good. Imagine a scenario where the patient forgets to put in allergy information leading a future physician to assume they have no allergies. (Yes you could provide patients with a zip file to just upload but there's still no guarantee the user won't unzip it and upload it manually or any of a million other stupid things that users sometimes do) Had Google actually engaged the industry rather than throwing something at them Google Health could have literally changed the world. Which is a far cry from the quick death it has found itself suffering.

bhousel 15y ago
I would actually like to talk to you more about this.. I have a (very early stage) startup on the side called Ditto Health that is using the Direct Project as a model to make it easy to transfer data between health care providers and patients. The problems with Google Health are exactly what you said. Put another way, they positioned themselves as an endpoint and made it Everyone Else's Problem to send their medical data into their repository. Health care providers aren't interested in hiring programmers to send their data into another system for no benefit to them. They have already invested plenty of time and money in EHR systems, and want to get data from all other places (some electronic, some paper) into their own system. And it should go without saying that this needs to be done in a HIPAA compliant way. Anyway, I'm always interested to talk more about this stuff, feel free to contact me at the email provided in my profile and maybe we can work with your agency.
- klbarry 15y ago
  I always thought Google Health could make a fortune for the middle-man, if some of the OP's problems were addressed. It's perfect for it - a very complicated set-up, and no marketing, but the final benefits are enormous and easy to understand. You could start by signing up your parents, then charge their friends and etc some nominal fee for setting everything up...
frossie 15y ago
Had Google actually engaged the industry Engaging the industry is a customer-serving function. I suspect that Google is just not interested in that kind of activity - because if they were, surely they would be better at it. It almost seems like if a project can't survive by sheer Google brainpower alone, they have no interest in sticking with it.
- klbarry 15y ago
  Not necessarily true - their lobbying arm was very successful getting Nevada to allow their self driving cars.
  - eli 15y ago
    Lobbying doesn't strike me as being very similar to B2C customer service.
  - cma 15y ago
    We can't really judge the success of that until after the first crash.
ilamont 15y ago
Had Google actually engaged the industry rather than throwing something at them... This has been their M.O. for the news industry -- create some gee-whiz tool on their own or with minimal industry input, and see if it sticks. Sometimes the tool succeeds (second iteration of Google News), oftentimes it addresses a marginal need that no one really cares about (see Living Stories, see http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/ http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/) and almost always the tool completely fails to help solve long-term business problems, which is the number one concern of the news industry.
- joshu 15y ago
  Google didn't do the news stuff with minimal input. I know because I lead one of the teams on this. The hole in the news industry is much larger than anything Google is going to be able to fill. Calcified organizations, insane cost structures, low value production, archaic formats... this will take more than some software to fix.
localhost3000 15y ago
I agree. Very sad to see this die. It's something the world desperately needs and I had hoped a co like Google could make it happen...
gshayban 15y ago
As a health care IT pro, I think you're right about the conclusions, but your reasoning is off. Google is not pulling the plug because of a technical problem with the product (security/HIPAA), but a social issue. You can have the most beautiful API, repository, and website in the world, but it's worthless without any data. Ostensibly Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are "personal health repositories" (PHR's), and live and die based on the content, not the platform. Health care data has high complexity, lives in heterogenous silos (most of them obsolete), and has a huge variance in quality. Doctors don't understand it (and shouldn't have to), and patients certainly don't. It is certainly plausible for patients to expect that their health info is accessible to them online. With all their prowess, Google could have helped people expose their data. I do this every day with providers. Google could have built more alliances with care providers (both large and small) and helped get an initial seed of users. They announced some, but not enough. Basically the only things the mainstream media covered about PHR's so far have been their birth, and now death. Nil penetration. The health care industry needs technical help beyond Obama's stimulus, the existant products are so weak and suffer from so much technical debt... I actually Google could have done well. They just didn't follow through. Now Dr. Chrono or Practice Fusion are far better positioned.
nl 15y ago
Well...ok...but then how are health care providers supposed to put information in for their clients? Google wanted Google Health to totally reshape the health informatics industry. When they say our primary relationship is with the user that's what they really mean. They intended to let people control their own data. Yes, there are issues with this idea, but there are issues with health record portability as it currently operates.

bhousel 15y ago

I would actually like to talk to you more about this.. I have a (very early stage) startup on the side called Ditto Health that is using the Direct Project as a model to make it easy to transfer data between health care providers and patients. The problems with Google Health are exactly what you said. Put another way, they positioned themselves as an endpoint and made it Everyone Else's Problem to send their medical data into their repository. Health care providers aren't interested in hiring programmers to send their data into another system for no benefit to them. They have already invested plenty of time and money in EHR systems, and want to get data from all other places (some electronic, some paper) into their own system. And it should go without saying that this needs to be done in a HIPAA compliant way. Anyway, I'm always interested to talk more about this stuff, feel free to contact me at the email provided in my profile and maybe we can work with your agency.

klbarry 15y ago
I always thought Google Health could make a fortune for the middle-man, if some of the OP's problems were addressed. It's perfect for it - a very complicated set-up, and no marketing, but the final benefits are enormous and easy to understand. You could start by signing up your parents, then charge their friends and etc some nominal fee for setting everything up...

frossie 15y ago

Had Google actually engaged the industry Engaging the industry is a customer-serving function. I suspect that Google is just not interested in that kind of activity - because if they were, surely they would be better at it. It almost seems like if a project can't survive by sheer Google brainpower alone, they have no interest in sticking with it.

klbarry 15y ago
Not necessarily true - their lobbying arm was very successful getting Nevada to allow their self driving cars.
- eli 15y ago
  Lobbying doesn't strike me as being very similar to B2C customer service.
- cma 15y ago
  We can't really judge the success of that until after the first crash.

ilamont 15y ago

Had Google actually engaged the industry rather than throwing something at them... This has been their M.O. for the news industry -- create some gee-whiz tool on their own or with minimal industry input, and see if it sticks. Sometimes the tool succeeds (second iteration of Google News), oftentimes it addresses a marginal need that no one really cares about (see Living Stories, see http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/ http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/) and almost always the tool completely fails to help solve long-term business problems, which is the number one concern of the news industry.

joshu 15y ago
Google didn't do the news stuff with minimal input. I know because I lead one of the teams on this. The hole in the news industry is much larger than anything Google is going to be able to fill. Calcified organizations, insane cost structures, low value production, archaic formats... this will take more than some software to fix.

localhost3000 15y ago

I agree. Very sad to see this die. It's something the world desperately needs and I had hoped a co like Google could make it happen...

gshayban 15y ago

As a health care IT pro, I think you're right about the conclusions, but your reasoning is off. Google is not pulling the plug because of a technical problem with the product (security/HIPAA), but a social issue. You can have the most beautiful API, repository, and website in the world, but it's worthless without any data. Ostensibly Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are "personal health repositories" (PHR's), and live and die based on the content, not the platform. Health care data has high complexity, lives in heterogenous silos (most of them obsolete), and has a huge variance in quality. Doctors don't understand it (and shouldn't have to), and patients certainly don't. It is certainly plausible for patients to expect that their health info is accessible to them online. With all their prowess, Google could have helped people expose their data. I do this every day with providers. Google could have built more alliances with care providers (both large and small) and helped get an initial seed of users. They announced some, but not enough. Basically the only things the mainstream media covered about PHR's so far have been their birth, and now death. Nil penetration. The health care industry needs technical help beyond Obama's stimulus, the existant products are so weak and suffer from so much technical debt... I actually Google could have done well. They just didn't follow through. Now Dr. Chrono or Practice Fusion are far better positioned.

nl 15y ago

Well...ok...but then how are health care providers supposed to put information in for their clients? Google wanted Google Health to totally reshape the health informatics industry. When they say our primary relationship is with the user that's what they really mean. They intended to let people control their own data. Yes, there are issues with this idea, but there are issues with health record portability as it currently operates.