

Why Google Health Failed—It's because of how Doctors are reimbursed - jerrya
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/why-google-really-failed-money/

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brudgers
Any competent analysis which relies on the US system as the model for
healthcare has to address the non-compliance of Google Health with HIPAA and
the inability of healthcare providers to enter data into an insecure system.

That's not to say that reimbursement is not at the root of many of the unique
problems of US healthcare. But nevertheless, Google Health was fatally flawed
from inception.

[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipaa>]

~~~
zecho
<https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/hipaa.html>

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michaelpinto
Google "failed" because they didn't have to succeed. In terms of corporate
culture Google makes products that do well with the general public, but
anything with health is both very niche and mission critical. To really crack
that market takes a singular focus -- and that's not just creating the product
but dealing with things like lobbying and sales. I'll grant you that the folks
at Google are very bright, but very bright doesn't mean you can do anything.
And I suspect that this was just a bit too much of a stretch for them (unless
they purchased a company that was already in that space).

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dr_
The author is correct in suggesting that for any such system to work, there
has to be involvement of health care providers and, without being reimbursed,
they are not likely to get involved.

But I really feel Google Health failed because there simply wasn't enough
consumer involvement. It could have continued as a system that allowed
patients to monitor their own medication use, blood sugar, blood pressure,
etc. and analyze it for them and provide information for them to take to their
physician - but that never happened. By and large, most consumers of
healthcare in this country are the elderly, and a lot of the current
generation is not going to go online and store and update all their healthcare
data.

I do some work in the long term care setting and recently I saw an older
patient in this setting get an iPad. Some of the facilities have started
talking about implementing wifi, a few already have because gradually some
patients are beginning to demand it. When you see this becoming more
widespread, you'll know there's a paradigm shift taking place, and that's when
you'll see things like Google Health, or Microsoft Health Vault or Avado
really start taking off.

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nradov
I don't think the problem with Google Health was really money or lack of
reimbursement. My employer OptumInsight has software to push out copies of
medical data to personal health record (PHR) systems within the context of a
larger health information exchange (HIE). So if the community has an HIE in
place then the data just flows (almost) automatically after the patient has
signed up with a supported PHR: it doesn't cost the physicians any more. I
think our competitors and even stand-alone electronic health record vendors
have similar capabilities.

I think the real problem with Google Health is that they just didn't try.
After the initial launch there were minimal resources devoted to it. Their
data model was obsolete from the beginning. And they could only accept data in
Continuity of Care Record (CCR) format which is itself an obsolete and poorly
supported standard, now supplanted by various specializations of HL7 CDA.
Those were fixable problems but would have required a lot of work.

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drink
This post is entirely self serving and misses a key point: Why would I want
the world's largest advertising company to have access to my healthcare data?!

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zecho
The answer is, supposedly, data portability, which is a pain in the ass from
hospital to hospital, or even doctor to doctor in the same hospital system. My
wife, a nurse, has horror stories about how they sometimes have to fax info to
other departments, just to have it re-entered into the same software.

Also, Google doesn't advertise on their Health product.

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ZenzerNet
Just a silly story: some hospitals here in Norway print out patient-
information, get an ambulance (an ambulance!) to drive it to the other
hospital, and a nurse will type it into the other system (45 minutes she says
it takes her). 2011 AD. <http://www.nrk.no/nett-tv/indeks/250622/>

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rdouble
Most doctors work for a big healthcare system these days. For better or worse,
those systems are already using Epic, or something like it.

