14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, during a press event held at the Mountain View headquarters, Google has announced the release of Google Health. The first official mention of the service was made at the Google Factory Tour, but Google Health was accessible even earlier on. The new service plans to offer search support to a considerable number of users who are already using the Google search engine, in order to recover information about healthcare.
The Google Health team has been put to the work of organizing the huge amount of information coming from healthcare sources every year. The service, which was announced in mid-2007, will be free of charge and will enable its users to collect and manage their medical records and health information through an online profile. Google Health, which for the moment will only be available to in the US, will provide users with the means to educate themselves on health issues.
Creating a profile on this new service will allow its users to better understand their own health condition or to search for a doctor, whenever they happen to be in need of medical assistance. The information you fill in on your profile can be accessed for viewing by other websites, which you grant due permission to. You can update your profile with symptoms and test results, thus making your healthcare data complete and offering more information to a doctor. In turn, this can help a physician better diagnose a patient.
Google Health has been developed to offer users a platform of medical information, much like an online encyclopedia. Under the search bar, there's a "Health Topics" link that will forward the user to a list of health related topics. Each one provides information about possible symptoms, treatment and causes, offering users a better insight into that specific illness.
The service hasn't been designed to provide its users with medical advice, serving instead a more informational purpose: it provides information about a serious number of health-related topics and offers its users a platform for creating their own healthcare database.