Slashdot Mirror
Google Health's Lifeline Runs Out
turing0 writes "As a former bioinformatics researcher and CTO I have some sad news to start 2012 with. Though I am sure not a surprise to the Slashdot crowd, it appears we — or our demographic — made up more than 75% of the Google Health userbase. Today marks the end of Google Health. (Also see this post for the official Google announcement and lame excuse for the reasoning behind this myopic decision.) The decision of Google to end this excellent service is a fantastic example of what can represent the downside of cloud services for individuals and enterprises. The cloud is great when and while your desired application is present — assuming it's secure and robust — but you are at the mercy of the provider for longevity." (Read more, below.)
turing0 continues:
"I am surprised to see Google abandoning Google Health just when we can see the benefit to personal health when micro sensors such as the Nike Plus and Jawbone's UP bracelet are entering the market. Greater amounts of personal health data can be gathered now via smartphone and then turned into valuable preventative as well as useful diagnostic medical information.
Shuttering Google Health is a surprising and short-sighted decision on Google's behalf, IMHO. Perhaps closing the Google Health service is not 'Evil' per se — but given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs. Services like Google Health are a fantastic public relations tool as well as an amazing potential source of raw scientific data if nothing else.
In closing, it's very funny to note Google suggests Google Health users migrate GH data to the Microsoft Health Vault. Hopefully some Web service other than Health Vault will rise from the ashes of Google Health. The real benefit in terms of Google being a custodian of my health and wellness records via Google Health was that Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals. Now I am not so sure; perhaps it's time to re-claim my email ..."
Shuttering Google Health is a surprising and short-sighted decision on Google's behalf, IMHO. Perhaps closing the Google Health service is not 'Evil' per se — but given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs. Services like Google Health are a fantastic public relations tool as well as an amazing potential source of raw scientific data if nothing else.
In closing, it's very funny to note Google suggests Google Health users migrate GH data to the Microsoft Health Vault. Hopefully some Web service other than Health Vault will rise from the ashes of Google Health. The real benefit in terms of Google being a custodian of my health and wellness records via Google Health was that Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals. Now I am not so sure; perhaps it's time to re-claim my email ..."
Another day, another Google service bites the dust. At this rate, they're set to outdo Microsoft in the number of obsoleted APIs and services that they use to pull the rug out from under people. And why shouldn't they? We're not the customers. Advertisers are, and if a service isn't helping Google's advertisers, they're not interested in keeping it around.
This is the first time I've heard of Google Health.
I'm sure Google would be willing to keep the service running if you were willing to pay for it.
Deleted
That also means that everyone loses trust in Google's services. They just seem to cancel anything anytime they want. There was an earlier discussion about Native Client. Who's to say Google won't just drop it? Even Microsoft offers very specific end-of-lifecycle dates and they're always several years in to the future. With every version, too!
I won't be trusting Google's services to stay up, and hence won't be using them either. I only use the ones I can afford to end randomly, like search and youtube.
The load of money they have moving contains quite a few secrets which together make everything, very, very unpredictable. They tell us one thing and do other. Call me paranoid, but keep an eye out for any low-profit services that you use because you never really know when they are going to be shut down. Whether a huge company running it or not.
One way of interpreting the decision is that Google is finding it hard to make money off tech-savvy people (who probably use adblockers and can tell the difference between sponsored links and actual search results, etc).
This is not unlike when they canceled Firefly, a few geeks are devastated, hardly anyone else notices.
Considering the fact that I - somebody who in many ways spends more time on the Internet than off it - have not heard about this interesting service until today, I seriously doubt that the problem is that there haven't been enough takers. Yes, it sounds a touch megalomaniacal. But my conclusion is that Google has simply just not raised awareness about this product. With the amount of faeces being thrown all over the interwebz for other products such as Google Plus, I dare say that a small fraction of the resources expended could have saved initiatives such as Google Health from flatlining ...
One big thing is that the server-side has all the control. I find this great for me as a service provider. This is one reason companies love providing these services.
However, as a user of various services I realise I have no control. If the services I rely on were to disappear tomorrow there is nothing I can do about it and I'm totally powerless to stop it. The service provided may even be profitable for a provider but if it is not proftable *enough*, or there are cost cutting mesures being done by corporate head-office then the service can be axed. Even if the service is critcal to my business
So the lesson to be learned is the same point made by the Free Software advocates. If software is critical to yourself or your business then you must ensure you have complete *control* of the software, all the way down to having the right to modify the source code if you need to. The convience of web-based services will never compensate for the loss of control. It is a strategic business decision to make: control (the long-term strategic view) or convenience (the short-term tactical view). I fully expect lots of sob stories like this to appear until the vendors start pitching back to CIOs that they could regain control by bringing stuff in-house again (for a fee, of course). Using Cloud services is no different to the 'offshoring' fad that the wise avoided for critical capabilities, followed by the realision that it doesn't always work and the resulting 'onshoring' renormalization. Expect a term like 'in-housing' or something similar to appear in trade rags in a couple of years.
Whatever you do: don't lose control of your critical software and services (and use Free Software!).
I've been an avid user of Google Health for a couple years now. Since the decision to end the service was announced, I've attempted numerous times to find some sense of replacement from HealthVault. HealthVault is a great service, but its hardly equivalent. For instance, HealthVault is merely a storage system for your raw data, and to view it or continue to keep track of it, you have to utilize other services (such as through the Mayo Clinic) with which HV interfaces to manage. It has a lot of possibility, in that you can utilize many specialized services from many different places, however it fails at keeping the experience seemless. You always know that you are leaving to a new site, and often times go through redundant logins and registrations.
Google Health however kept everything restricted to a couple pages. Your blood pressure measurements, weights and other vitals were displayed in concise graphs The greatest strength of Google Health was its stripped down visuals and your ability to create your own trackers for virtually any metric. I used it to keep track of my migraine headaches in hopes of finding a trend which would reveal possible triggers. Some of the services, such as the Mayo Clinic's personal health manager, which use HealthVault offer similar customization, but they are very stripped down, the interfaces are clunky and, once again, it takes an annoying amount of log-in's and desperate clicking to get into the service.
I wish Google would just release the source, so that someone else could construct their own version. I for one would. I loved it.
The concept of Google having any access to health information is frightening, to say the least. They already have way too much information about way too many things for way too many of us, already.
I have a feeling I am not alone in this feeling about the Google overlords and this might have contributed to the non-popularity of Google Health. And no, I wouldn't want to give health information to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Microsoft either!
I am amazed regarding the postings here of people who have never heard of it. But for those people, Wikipedia is your friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_health
It is "HIPAA", not "HIPPA", and yes it most certainly DOES apply to information you give to a company :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_health_information
Even Microsoft offers very specific end-of-lifecycle dates and they're always several years in to the future. With every version, too!
With Microsoft, you're the customer. With Google, you're the product.
See "covered entity":
https://www.cms.gov/HIPAAGenInfo/06_AreYouaCoveredEntity.asp
That also means that everyone loses trust in Google's free services.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously - did turing0 like this "excellent" service enough to be willing to pay for it? If so, did he ever write Google and suggest it move to a for-fee model? After all, we had quite a bit of warning this was going to happen.
Reading the rest of turing0's post, though... it's obvious what he wants is for Google to continue to provide this service at no cost to himself - "given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs."
Heck, I'd be irritated if Google decided to discontinue Gmail - but I'd recognize it's their right to do so, given I'm not paying a dime for it (directly, anyway - and I don't believe Google Health could be contextual-ad-supported in the same way, what with FIPAA and all).
#DeleteChrome
Turing0, how much were you paying for your Google Health? what service guarantee did you get for your paid contract with them? Oh, $0 and nothing. Quit your whining, so a free trial balloon was cancelled, pony up some bucks for an equivalent service with a vendor and then you'll have a right to complain about service or lack thereof.
Maybe I should have put a [sic] after HIPPA since that's how the original post had it.
Either way:
- a health care provider that conducts certain transactions in electronic form (called here a "covered health care provider").
- a health care clearinghouse.
- a health plan.
Which one of those is Google? If a reporter comes to my hospital and asks the doctors "Does he have cancer?" it would be a violation of HIPAA to give them the answer.
If I ran down the hallway screaming "I have cancer! I have cancer!" It would not be a violation for any of those people to spread the word. Same goes for Myspace, Facebook, or in this case, Google.
Seriously. I never recommend to my customers that they rely on "cloud services". In the last year or so, even Amazon and other services have gone down, taking innumerable websites offline for unpredictable amounts of time.
Just recently, an Amazon server went down, and a customer was notified that their site was down and that they had 48 hours to save the site or it would be gone... and they received the notice about 24 hours after that 48 hours had already expired.
Other people I know have had other, similar experiences.
My advice to customers is: DO NOT make your business dependent on the performance of "services" over which your have no control. You are putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, and that's just plain a Bad Idea. And that includes everything from depending on Google Apps to sites on EC2.
I'll pass, thanks very much.
The health market is almost entirely database-driven: it's all medical records of one sort or another. Patient charts, billing codes, etc: it's just databases. The database end is complex due to absurdly complicated standards, but also because systems have proprietary data stores that don't talk to other systems well. The worst part, though, is the user interfaces: most industries have UI's that don't suck, but health never seemed to get this right. The database engineers have been designing the UI's forever.
There's a brilliant market here for someone with the vision to combine Apple-quality system integration and UI with a narrow focus on the healthcare industry. Whoever does it is going to sell their product for cheaps to a bunch of doctors and become a defacto standard.
You're largely correct but the biggest problem is that even at an Enterprise level, it is a cottage industry. Everyone has different processes. What works well for one system is an absolute disaster in another. Hell, what works on one floor of a hospital doesn't work on another.
It's very frustrating.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault's personal health records (PHRs) are well known in health IT circles, but even among the health IT and healthcare informatics professionals I work with, uptake has been very shallow. There have been connected PHR-enabled sensors available for weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, and many other biometrics for some time, but again, very little interest in flowing this data into stand alone PHRs.
Stand alone PHRs aren't the only way to facilitate doctor-patient interaction. Many leading electronic medical records systems (EMRs) offer integrated personal health records - the disadvantage being that these records only show the data from one provider or health care system. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are rapidly springing up across the country to facilitate provider to provider data integration and provide a compelling model for direct patient participation in their care.
Personally, I've tracked these services for years but I've never bothered to create an account. Entering my information manually is tedious, and the standards and integration between EMRs and stand-along PHRs is emerging at best. If I had a fully populated PHR, it's not clear what value I'd really get out of it. My main provider already has most of my information and can source information directly from other practices when needed. Doctors are culturally suspicious of patient submitted data, as they have concerns about amateur self-diagnosis and drug-seeking patients.
The way Google is winding this down increases my trust in their other services. Google announced their plan to shutter Google Health a year and a half before the final shutdown date. They're offering multiple data export and migration options, including instructions and support to migrate to their largest competitor, HealthVault. I've had significantly worse experiences with migration / upgrade of many paid services / software - I'm looking at you Intuit.
Most likely that means it wasn't for you. I've been watching a lot of shows lately that were canceled or otherwise ended early. The State, The Tick, Brisco County, Dilbert etc., and they were good shows that for one reason or another only lasted for a season or two worth of shows. The problem ultimately is that it's hard to say at what point a show should be canceled. It's easy to assume that they'll continue indefinitely when much of the time they don't, you end up with a show like The Simpsons or Family Guy that continues past the point of being funny and becomes kind of a drudge to watch, if you even bother.
Services are largely the same way, sometimes Google cancels them before anybody knows what they're for, like wave, and other times they let them go too long. I get the feeling that health was probably a matter of the latter.
Google isn't selling people.
Microsoft makes most of their money selling things for which end users, be they businesses or individuals, pay real money. Microsoft Office, Xbox, stuff like that. Their customers are their users. Microsoft's aggressive activity is generally aimed at competitors.
Google sells ads, and information about and access to their users. Google's customers are almost entirely (94% of revenue) advertisers. Google's aggressive activity is aimed at their users. When Microsoft got into serious legal trouble, it was over their behavior towards competitors. When Google got into serious legal trouble, it was about their behavior towards users. See the DOJ non-prosecution agreement in the pharmacy case.
I'm surprised that nobody noticed it: Google is stopping all its future innovations, and concentrate on short-term revenues, which is a decision from their CEO, not by the cost of maintaining the current tools (it's a very small cost).
Something similar happened in 2000 with the 3M company, when James McNerney from GE became the new CEO.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm
In 5 years, 3M, which was ranked as the most innovative company in the world, fell at the 7th place.
This year, 3M disappeared from the 50 most innovative companies, check here:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html
McNerney focused on using Six Sigma, and improving productivity.
3M, based on a culture of innovation since 100 years, had its internal culture almost destroyed in only 5 years.
The inventor of post-it said that it would have been impossible that the "post-it" concept would have been successful using the new method.
In my opinion, it's a very short-sighted decision, as you can see with Microsoft and IBM, which invest a lot of money in innovation.
It's impossible to predict what will work in a few years, and I doubt that the current monopoly of Google on Internet ads will long very last.
Now, let me give a prediction:
currently, Apple and Google are ranked 1st and 2nd as the most innovative companies.
I bet that in 2 years, they won't be in the top 10 anymore.
records are hoarded by doctors, pharmacies, hospitals
It's offensive how this works. Take my X-rays for example. My surgeon sent me some place to get them done. He's the one with a clue; they just take pictures. Despite this, they insist on having me wait for some on-staff radiologist to "interpret" the X-rays. They claim state law requires this. (if so, surely because they lobbied for it) Then I'm not allowed to truly own the images, physically or by copyright, and neither is my surgeon. (again by state law, which they surely lobbied for) I'm allowed to borrow the X-rays, taking them to my surgeon so he can see them. I'm sternly warned that I'm violating some law if I don't bring them back. WTF, is somebody covering the storage costs? Fortunately I didn't see a due date, so I'm still "borrowing" my own damn X-rays a decade later and I don't remember who the "owner" is. If I had foolishly been a good boy and returned them, I'd currently have no possible way to access them. The X-rays would be gone, preventing future surgeons from being able to compare them with newer X-rays or being able to make an initial guess before ordering new X-rays.
The same goes for the dentist. IMHO, it's a racket to encourage repeat business. Come back to us, or you suffer extra X-ray exposure and it won't even be covered by your insurance.
No, you're wrong there. Google sells access (for advertisers) to an extremely large pool of people whom use Google services. Google does not sell anything to that pool of people. While it might be slightly disingenuous to say that the pool of people is the product, they most certainly are not the customers.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
As the developer of a Patient Management System, I agree completely there. Our code is littered with location dependent workarounds for individual business units doing things differently one way or another for no apparent reason.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yep, just look at the OP's comment: "it was on par with Farscape". However, IIRC, Farscape was already gone when Firefly came along.
Imagine if they made a new sci-fi TV show, and sci-fi fans complained that "it's only on par with ST:TNG but with better fx". Would that not be reason alone to watch it (assuming you liked TNG)? It's not like they're still making TNG episodes after all. Do people really expect every new TV show or movie to be so much better than everything that came in the past? That's a pretty ridiculous expectation.
The problem with sci-fi is that there just isn't much available that's good. There's been some great stuff in the past, but you can only re-watch old shows so many times; you want something new, you don't want to always live in the past. Suppose you like movies about people in spaceships in outer space, like Alien/Aliens, the Star Trek movies, 2001, or countless other sci-fi movies in the 70s and 80s. Well, unless you put a continuous loop of the first 10 minutes of Avatar on your TV, you're not going to see a whole lot of this kind of sci-fi made in the last 5-10 years, because there have been almost no such movies made. If someone made a new show as good as Firefly, and it didn't get canceled as soon as people started watching it, sci-fi fans would be ecstatic simply because they now have such a show to watch, when currently they don't unless they want to watch endless reruns of a 20-year-old show.
It's free, therefore they cancel it is a fallacy. Paid services also get cancelled.
It's free, so they get to encourage you to rely on it then pull the rug from under you and you have to say "thank you" is also a fallacy. My lack of payment does not mean that the provider can't do me harm.
The message is clear. Cloud services are for suckers. If you can't independently access your data and run your code, it's integrity, security and accessibility are at the whim of the hosting company.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer