Google Health, having failed to catch on like so many of the IT colossus’ other projects, announced that it would go dark on Jan. 1, 2012.

 

The personal health record did not have “the broad impact that we hoped it would,” wrote Aaron Brown, senior product manager of Google Health. Its efforts to “translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to healthcare” had not panned out.

 

Still, Brown hoped the project had at least “raised the visibility of the role of the empowered consumer in their own care.” Google, he wrote, continues to be a believer in “the role information plays in healthcare and in improving the way people manage their health.”

 

The blogosphere was not without its schadenfreude. One writer called the portal “way overhyped, way underused.” Another declared that its “problems are of its own making.” (Google declined to comment for this story.)

 

In other quarters – including some of Google’s ostensible competitors – the mood was more wistful. Sean Nolan, chief architect of Microsoft’s HealthVault, extended “sincere thanks” to Google for having “built a great service and fought hard for the idea that the only way to really fix healthcare is to consumerize it.”

 

“You hate to see anybody go out of this space,” added Jeff Donnell, president of Fort Wayne, Ind.-based PHR developer NoMoreClipboard, which had partnered with the Google in the past. “Certainly having names like Google and Microsoft involved in the personal health record sector helps raise awareness and build legitimacy overall. A rising tide lifts all boats – especially when you’re really creating a brand new category.”

 

Some have argued that the writing is on the wall. Barely 7 percent of Americans have a PHR, and Google seems to have learned the hard way that, in Chilmark Research analyst John Moore’s words, “few consumers are interested in a digital filing cabinet for their records.”

 

 

That’s where Donnell sees the future – and not the distant future. “I see what’s happening in terms of patient engagement, and I know our business is taking off like a rocket,” he said. “This year we are going to be very profitable. We are going to see our sales at least quadruple.”

 

His firm is seeing interest on all fronts, “from physician practices and hospitals trying to comply with meaningful use requirements to organizations who see all this ACO writing on the wall.” They recognize, he said, that “we’ve got to do a better job of managing patients who have chronic conditions. We have to reduce readmissions and ER visits.”

 

Key to doing that is engaging patients. “We’re seeing more and more employers who are saying, ‘We can’t continue to absorb double-digit annual increases in our health insurance costs; we’ve got to find more ways to get employees and their families more engaged in their health and wellness,’” said Donnell. “Our phone is ringing off the hook.”

 

For five years, Donnell said, it’s been “a lot of missionary work,” but in the last six months it’s as if a dam has burst. In fact, he’s starting to hear from doctors whose patients are coming in to their office saying, “I’ve got a personal health record. Why aren’t you guys connected electronically? … When are you guys going to get with the 21st century?”

 

Granted, there aren’t nearly as many of those patients as most PHR vendors would like. Gaining more traction with the public won’t happen until “people can populate an EHR with existing data,” Donnell said.

 

Folks simply don’t want to spend a lot of time filling out themselves.

 

Luckily, meaningful use requires that EHRs be able to develop a continuity of care document. And “if we can get the CCD, we can bring it in and use it to populate the EHR,” he said.

 

“Contrary to what some people are saying,” he added, “the exit of Google Health from this sector does not mean the death knell, or that PHRs are still ahead of the wave. Our experience is completely contrary to that.”

 

 

“It’s false to say that consumers aren’t interested,” agreed Nate McLemore, general manager of business development and policy in Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group. “What’s key is getting providers connected with consumers. Perhaps one of the differences between Google’s approach and Microsoft’s is we have a lot of assets and are working on the providers side as well as the consumer side.”

 

Even as Microsoft makes it easier for the consumer to connect to HealthVault by making it easier to access, via smartphones, and using Facebook login as authentication, the company continues to connect “a lot of provider organizations to the HealthVault platform,” said McLemore.

 

Indeed, said Lynne Dunbrack, program director at IDC Health Insights, “one of the things that challenged Google in this space, perhaps more than HealthVault, (is that) they didn’t really have much in the way of connectivity – to providers, and to payers in particular.”

 

Sure, Google Health had connections to the chain pharmacies and Surescripts. And the two big providers with which it linked, Cleveland Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, “are luminaries, of course.”

 

But if a user doesn’t receive his or her care at either, he or she has to enter in data, said Dunbrack. “And were a consumer actually trying to aggregate your health data across multiple entities, that would be extremely difficult to do.”

 

Google Health “just didn’t have the connectivity needed to get a critical mass of people interested – not from a health and wellness standpoint, and certainly not for managing a chronic condition,” she added.

 

Still, the looming issue is “the overall lack of awareness consumers have about PHRs,” said Dunbrack.

 

Lately, though, she’s seen signs of a spark. She points to an IDC survey that found 34.1 percent of patients willing to use a personal health record if their physician recommended it to them; of those who already used PHRs, 36.9 percent did so because their doctor recommended it.

 

Providers have to be cheering, have to proselytize the technology, to truly drive personal health. “That really is the key,” said Dunbrack, “getting physicians on board.”