Is the Future of Patient-Managed Health Records Now a Thing of the Past?

The past few weeks have seen a number of interesting developments in IT and social networking, including the Google+ beta release, Facebook’s Skype integration, and LinkedIn’s multi-billion dollar IPO. But one of the most heralded initiatives from just three years ago – Google Health – is now quietly shutting its doors due to a lack of interest.

Google Health was designed as a tool to help patients manage their health care records online to facilitate information sharing with doctors, pharmacists, friends, and family. A 2008 New York Times article noted that the companies then racing to enter this seemingly burgeoning market “all hope to capitalize eventually on the trend of increasingly seeking health information online, and the potential of Internet tools to help consumers manage their own health care and medical spending.” The New York Times also described what was then seen as a successful Google Health pilot project at the Cleveland Clinic:

The pilot project, limited to 1,600 patients, was quickly oversubscribed, said C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer. Dr. Harris also said that when the clinic’s online health records, introduced in 2004, were linked to the Google record the clinic’s records were used more frequently by patients. “It positioned our personal health record more into an activity that they use every day,” Dr. Harris said.

The Google record, he said, allows the user to send personal information, at the individual’s discretion, into the clinic record or to pull information from the clinic records into the Google personal file.

The ability of patients to send information, in particular, can be helpful to clinic doctors, Dr. Harris said. For example, if a person sees specialists outside the clinic and receives a drug prescription from an outside doctor, it raises the risk of harmful drug interactions. “Until now, if a patient doesn’t remember to tell me,” he said, “I don’t know about drugs prescribed outside the Cleveland Clinic system.”

However, this scenario did not replicate itself when Google Health became available to the public. From The New York Times’ June 24 article entitled “Google To End Health Records Service After it Fails to Attract Users”:

But Google Health never really caught on. In a posting on the company’s blog on Friday, Aaron Brown, senior product manager for Google Health, wrote that the goal was to “translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to health care and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users.”

Yet, after three years, Mr. Brown said, “Google Health is not having the broad impact we had hoped it would.”

What happened? It seems that while consumers enjoy updating their relationship status, uploading photos of themselves, and playing online games, they find updating prescriptions and sharing X-rays to be quite a bore. Analyst Lynn Dunbrack told the Times, “Personal health records have been a technology in search of a market.” That’s a nice way to say that they are a solution in search of a problem – one that patients simply don’t see. Consumers have pretty much voted with their mouse-clicks and would rather cede the rather mundane maintenance of their medical records to health care professionals.

This is not to say that online health records are a dead business; substantial benefits can flow from the maintenance of medical records in a more accessible and fluid manner than the status quo. It just means that the patient-centered model where individuals dutifully update and share information probably isn’t going to catch on. The successful ventures are likely to be those managed by third parties like insurers.

This raises another big question: what does the failure of Google Health mean for the other consumer-driven, health information-sharing venture also backed by Google – 23andMe? 23andMe’s business model is to leverage the internet to allow consumers to use the results of their personal genomic tests to learn more about their health and connect online with similarly situated people.  Given Google’s investment in the company, there may have been several anticipated synergies between the two entities. But if Google Health was a free tool to manage medical records and learn about one’s health that failed from lack of interest, could 23andMe be that far behind when charging $99 for a spit kit in addition to a monthly subscription fee?