Very interesting article titled "The Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange:What Happened?" published by Health Affairs. The subtitle summarizes it all:

Lack of a compelling "value proposition" for potential investors was the main cause of the Santa Barbara Project’s demise.

To recall:

The Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange was once one of the most ambitious and publicized U.S. health information exchange (HIE) efforts. Eight years after its inception, and several months after providing some data, the Santa Barbara Project shut down operations.

This should give us all a bit of pause: build it (here to the tune of USD 10 million, so it wasn’t exactly underfunded) and they will come is now proven not to work. The lessons may will apply to healthcare, but also general-purpose identity exchange: if it doesn’t work in a vertical (healthcare), why do we think it might work anywhere else?

[Of course I think it can be made to work rather well, both in healthcare and general-purpose, but that’s a topic for another post.]