The problem is Google forgot how the internet works, and this why Google Health failed.

For those of you who missed it, Google Health was a personal health record (a place to track your health information) that launched a few years ago and Google recently decide to slowly shut down.

Now what I mean by the first statement I made is that Google got greedy, and they forgot how the internet was built. They know how the internet works, but they forgot that the internet was build by passionate individuals using their spare time to develop, code and grow sites of their interest. Unfortunately, their approach to Google Health was an corporate or private development style of development. They tried to work with hospitals, insurance agencies and a few other businesses and focused on trying to bring in their health information rather than really trying to work on the user interface and generating a market for users to track their health.

What I mean by this is what Walt Mossberg talked about at TEDMED. Google should have focused on pushing the technology companies, the engineers and developers that are making consumer devices to adopt standards and practice that allow users to aggregate their personal health information.

Slowly we are seeing devices, some of which I have bought and love, that are emerging that allow users to track their health (sleep, weight), fitness (blood pressure, speed), diet (calorie count) and exercise (running, biking) and the list is growing. This is the data the people are slowly starting to build, collect and become passionate about.

I think that Google should have capitalized on aggregating this type of information first in the PHR, or at least in equal parts. Sure it is fascinated, especially as a healthcare professional, the records we keep on patients, and the fancy labs and tests we order. But that is not what our patients need to see and learn about. They need to get better at monitoring their diet, doing more exercise and connecting the dots with their symptoms. Clearly PatientsLikeMe is the leader in the disease focus of PHR, but I think this is the same problem as our healthcare systems (world wide), we focus on disease not health.

If we can get patients passionately monitoring their personal health data, and start to pair that with the medical knowledge and insights we have into their disease, then we will have a useful PHR.