Google Health the rise and fall

Peluncuran Google Health

Awal tahun 2008 Google meluncurkan layanan Google Health dengan berkolaborasi dengan Cleveland Clinic. Persisnya tanggal 28 February 2008 Marissa Mayer, VP, Search & User Products menulis di blog Google sebagai berikut:

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.

For the healthcare industry, online personal health records (PHRs) aren't a new idea and, in some cases, online PHRs already exist for patients. Here's what we think sets Google Health apart:

Privacy and Security - Google Health will protect the privacy of your health information by giving you complete control over your data. We won't sell or share your data without your explicit permission.

Platform - We're assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you'll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors' records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.

Portability - Our Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. The user can simply import the data from each medical facility and then choose to share it with the other facilities.

User focus -We're proud of the product that we've designed and are continuing to build, but recognize that we are just at the initial stages of our "launch early and iterate" strategy.

Penutupan Google Health

Pertengahan tahun 2011, tepatnya tanggal 25 Juni 2011, atau hampir 3.5 tahun akhirnya Google menutup layanan tersebut.  Melalui Google Corporate Blog  ditulis:

When we launched Google Health, our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information. We wanted to translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to healthcare and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users.

Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. 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. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point will be permanently deleted.