Search giant Google has been working for months, in order to develop a new service in the field of consumer health.  The service will give doctors and patients easy access to electronic medical records. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt introduced Google Health at a healthcare conference in Florida yesterday.

"The opportunity here is for people to own their own health data - to have access to it, to control it and to direct how it's used," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user products, as quoted by the SF Chronicle.

The U.S. health care system has an expensive and old-fashioned record keeping system, as an estimated 90 percent of the medical records of patients are kept in cabinets in the doctors’ offices. Some health companies and clinics have invested a lot of money in information technology system and replacing old fashioned patients’ records with new electronic ones. In this way, it is much easier for doctors from different hospitals to share information about patients.

The first pilot project of Google, in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, began on Feb. 18. Cleveland Clinic is a non-profit medical center founded 87 years ago. The project will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who accepted to have their personal health information transferred so that it can be retrieved through Google’s new service, which won’t be available for the public.

Schmidt said yesterday that the company has signed deals with a wide array of hospitals and companies including medical tester Quest Diagnostics Inc, health insurer Aetna Inc, Walgreens and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. pharmacies.

Google’s brand new service features health profiles for each volunteer where the person will be able to store information about diseases, allergies, prescriptions, drugs used and any other facts regarding his or her medical history. Each profile will be protected by a password, which will be also required in order to use other services, such as email or personalized search tools.

Google’s initiative was criticized by many people because of concerns related to the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the powerful Internet company. But Google sees its expansion into health records management as a natural and logical extension, taking into account that its popular search engine is already processing millions of requests from users trying to find out more information about all kinds of health problems and recommended treatments.

Google decided to develop the new health service after noticing that millions of people from all around the world use the search engine to find information about illnesses and medical treatments. This way, it foresaw a huge opportunity to create a new advertising space.