Now that Google has put its ill-fated Google Health project to rest, we are wondering who will make the next big attempt to establish a personal health record (PHR) platform for healthy people. Many have tried and many have failed, and there is still no popular platform for gathering, analyzing and sharing health data.
Adam Bosworth founded Google Health in 2006 to provide an online place for consumers to store their own health data. Bosworth left shortly thereafter and went on to found Keas, a SF-based web startup which takes a more social approach to tracking one’s health via a competitive point system. In a recent interview on TechCrunch, Bosworth spoke about why he thought Google Health had failed, “It’s not social,” and “Google didn’t push to see what they could do that people would want.”
Google Health failed in part because the user interface did not motivate most users to upload their health data. By contrast, one of the fastest-growing health sites on the internet, PatientsLikeMe.com, has built its online health community to an impressive 105,000 subscribers, focused first on patients suffering from chronic diseases like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). The implied reward for this was high given the unmet health need, so it was an easy choice for patients to take the time to enter their valuable data. Healthy people have no such incentive for using PatientsLikeMe, but many seem to want to get in on the action. Armed with smartphones and social network memberships, a new health-savvy generation is looking to catalyze the growth of a new movement.
