On Wednesday, Google announced that it would stop developing as a stand-alone product its Web-based Google Wave, an application for real-time communication and collaboration, Healthcare IT News reports.
It remains unclear whether the decision will affect the company's plan to develop the application as an electronic health record platform.
Urs Holzle -- senior vice president of operations at Google -- wrote that the application simply did not receive enough user adoption (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 8/5).
He explained that the company would maintain the site until the end of the year and then extend the technology to other Google initiatives (Claburn, InformationWeek, 8/5).
Presentation Set for EHR Argument
Meanwhile, Google engineers Shirley Gaw and Umesh Shankar plan to promote the benefits of Google Wave in the electronic exchange of medical records at next week's USENIX HealthSec '10 workshop.
They argue that health records tend to provide only a snapshot of a patient's complete health narrative because:
- There is little information that describes how changes to a record are interpreted as a whole; and
- There is not a standard for including changes to a record made by the patient.
Gaw and Umesh note that Google Wave could address these issues (Healthcare IT News, 8/5).