Google Shutters Its Health Record Service

Google announced last week that it is ending its free Google Health program by the end of the year (although data will be available for download until January 1, 2013). Partnering with a variety of health-related companies and providers, such as CVS, Quest Diagnostics, Walgreens, Withings, and the Cleveland Clinic, the personal health record service allows users to manage their personal health and wellness info by volunteering their health records. We have written about the Withings WiFi body scale that works in conjunction with Google Health on Kinetic Shift. Unfortunately, Google Health failed to achieve the type of impact and widespread adoption that the company had hoped, the company said. The service has also had to deal with issues concerning privacy, as it is not a covered entity under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act laws.

According to a post on Google’s official blog, “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.”

If you’re a Google Health user, you can download your info as a PDF, Continuity of Care Record (CCR) XML that can be imported into other personal health tools like Microsoft HealthVault, CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, HTML and XML versions, and a ZIP archive of all files you’ve uploaded plus records in all formats just mentioned. Google also said, “Over the coming weeks we’ll also be adding the ability to directly transfer your health data to other services that support the Direct Project protocol, an emerging open standard for efficient health data exchange.”