On Thursday, Google revealed a few more details about its already controversial upcoming service, Google Health. "Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful," said Google’s vice president of search and user products, Marissa Mayer, in a blog post. "Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online," Mayer also added in her post dedicated to the company’s brand new personal health records management service.

In order to demonstrate what Google Health is in fact and how it will work, Google offered a screen shot of the new service, showing a sample user’s health Profile Summary in the right-hand sidebar: the Profile contained specific sections for Conditions, Medications, Allergies and Procedures, while the left-hand sidebar included links to a subscriber’s profile data, health notices, medical contacts, as well as drug interaction warnings. The subscriber was able to add information to his or her Google Health profile, to import health records, to search for doctors or to find online health management tools. Links to all these actions appeared in the center column.

Furthermore, the screen shot Google provided in order to make everybody imagine how Google Health will work included also an appointment and chart viewing widget associated with the Cleveland Clinic, which announced the partnership with Google on February 21.

The Cleveland Clinic is an old not-for profit medical center and said that the project would involve 1,500 to 10,000 people at the medical center who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal medical records. This means that Google is still testing its service, which will not be open to the general public.

Google’s upcoming service was already criticized by many people because of concerns related to the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the powerful Internet company. However, 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.