Recently Google announced that it was abandoning Google Health, it's consumer-oriented 'personal health record' product.  The vaunted search engine company, who has done so many things right that the Feds are now poking around anti-trust and monopoly charges, has struggled with Google Health from the beginning.  It was a rare and dramatic move for them to announce its death.

We have a couple of observations from watching this story.  In no particular order:

• Healthcare is hard.  It doesn't matter how good you are in other industries, ours is a weird animal with its own set of rules and strange dynamics.  Google is not the first newcomer that found tough sledding in this bizarre world we call healthcare.  It won't be the last.
• It turns out that an electronic filing cabinet for all of my healthcare stuff is not a very interesting value proposition for patients.  For most, it solves a problem that is just not that important.  Where this does matter to patients, the process of getting stuff into the personal health record is just too much hassle.
• It is not that patients don't want to do things online.  They just want to do stuff that matters and makes life more efficient for them.  Things like making appointments, paying bills, checking lab results, and getting prescription refills actually provide good value.  Lo and behold, those are the things they want to do directly with their doctor.  That 'patient portal' thing that now comes with your EHR?  It does all those things.  You need it because your patients want you to have it.  Score one for the physicians.
• It turns out that billion dollar branding does not build as much trust as you would think.  Patients still trust their doctor more than Google with this type of information.  We're not sure yet what that means for physicians, but score two for the physicians.
• When patients think about their information being scattered all over the healthcare system, they don't want to be the one responsible for gathering it.  They expect us, the collective us, to do it.  We are the ones that generate the information and we are the ones that need to use it as we care for them.  This is why 'health information exchanges' matter so much and are the real lever to make all of these EHR investments pay off.  Pay attention here.