Google announced plans to shut down Google Health by the end of the year, ending the company’s foray into the electronic health record arena.
Google Health is a no-charge service aimed at providing a one-stop repository for an individual’s medical records and health information, complete with features that set personal health goals, track progress and share health information with physicians, family and friends.
"When we launched Google Health, our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information," the company wrote on its blog. "We wanted to translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to healthcare and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users."
Apparently the service didn’t really catch on.
"With a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would," Google Health senior product manager Aaron Brown and Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl wrote in the blog post.
The product will be discontinued by the end of this year, but users will have until January 1, 2013 to retrieve their data and print it, save it or transfer it to another service.