How far has Google Health really fallen? To answer our own question from just over a month ago, off the map entirely. The platform, which already was under heavy scrutiny, will shut down due to a lack of "scalability," according to Google Health Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown in a company blog post.
"Now, with a few years of experience, we've observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would," Brown wrote earlier today. "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."
Brown continued, announcing that the site would operate under a business-as-usual mantra through the end of this year. Additionally, Google Health will allow users to download their data through the end of 2012, and in the coming weeks, will give users the option to transfer health data to other services supporting the Direct Project protocol; after Jan. 13, 2013, however, any remaining data on the platform will be "permanently deleted."
Google Health launched in 2008 and served as a rival to Microsoft's HealthVault personal health record platform. A little more than a year ago, Chilmark Research analyst John Moore reported that Google management had grown tired of their product's "lack of relevancy" and were on the verge of "pulling the plug on Google Health and either letting the team go or reassigning them to other divisions within the organization." Google's response, at the time, was that the project was "alive and well," calling it a "multi-year effort."
To learn more:
- read Brown's post on Google's official blog