Google pulled the plug on its personal health records experiment when it shelved Google Health last week. The company intended to empower patients with a central repository for their health care information but failed to deliver on its promise and the venture never gained traction with the public.

But the story of Google Health need not be comprised entirely of letdown and discouragement. One health care technology expert believes there are valuable lessons to take away from the program’s failure and countless opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs to pick up where the search giant left off.

The first step to move forward, according to Dr. Ron Ribitzky, CEO of Newton, Massachusetts-based, bio-medical informatics firm R&D Ribitzky, is by examining where Google went awry. He believes the search giant's most costly miscalculation lied in a fundamental assumption it made about health care information.

“Google took a naive leap of faith by assuming that success in the consumer-driven search and storage services would translate into success with health care information,” says Ribitzky, whose background includes clinical practice, consulting and software development. “The company relied on its own tools, its own people, and believed it could make its current system work with health records because it worked in other domains. But it’s not that simple.”

For instance, Google equipped its health and wellness service with the same type of search engines and rigid data-entry fields that are used across the company’s array of web-based products and services. The problem, Ribitzky says, is that those drop-down data-entry menus often limit the information that users can plug into response fields. That may work with basic information (gender, age, location, etc.) elicited by other Google services, but it creates problems when users need to store specific and widely varying information pertaining to medical diagnoses and symptoms.

Google’s signature search engine technology is similarly unsuited for assembling health care information. The simple, single-page search platform, he explains, is optimized to gather and sort through relatively stable data, like information about consumer products, and not built to manage “huge sets of raw health care data.” The search results are also organized largely by popularity. That's a good system when users are shopping for shoes, but not so good when they are searching for the most accurate information about unique symptoms and conditions.

“The service simply wasn’t useable because people could not collect the information they needed,” Ribitzky says. “Systems that are not useable will not be adopted, even if they are given away for free.”

The former Intel health care strategist notes that, in addition to its functionality problems, Google Health had a surprisingly outdated appearance. That, he believes, further crippled its ability to attract a generation that demands the most modern technology and design. “Somehow,” he says, “Google’s record of great innovation did not prevent them from creating a user-interface that looks like it is from 20 years ago.”

The company’s attempt to promote do-it-yourself health management may have been derailed by its own attempt at do-it-yourself product development. According to Ribitzky, many of Google’s misjudgments stem from the company’s over-reliance on its existing tools and its reluctance to “bring more players to the table.”

“Google had the opportunity to work with more small businesses and entrepreneurs, but elected to do most of the development in-house,” he says. “The program was therefore driven by smart technology rather than industry professionals who know how information is used in the health care domain. You need both to make a system work.”

Once the Googles of the world learn that lesson, there should be many an opportunity for independent businesses, health care experts and tech-savvy entrepreneurs to help build the next personal health records service.

“In the future, instead of going it alone, big companies will have to strategize and collaborate with small businesses and entrepreneurs that specialize in individual components of the healthcare services they are trying to build,” Ribitzky says. Large, multinational companies can afford important research and development that smaller firms could never obtain, he adds, but those giant companies rarely have the industry-specific expertise to match that of small firms and entrepreneurs.

That could mean lucrative opportunities for a wide range of health and technology specialists. Businesses or individuals that develop improved search engine platforms will be in demand, Ribitzky says, as well as those that can create engaging user-interface designs. Perhaps the most sought-after collaborators for these projects, though, will be those that develop software than can “massage useful information” out of an expansive collection of user-gathered and user-entered data.

“The Google Health failure is sad, but it should lead to more collaboration on these projects on the future,” Ribitzky says. “And should also lead to many great opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs to step in and fill the void.”