Google unveiled new capabilities in healthcare March 18 at its "The Check Up" event, including medical records application programing interfaces within Health Connect.

The Medical Records APIs let individuals read and write medical record information across multiple apps in standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources format. Health Connect supports more than 50 data types and encourages easy access to health data. People store the data locally on their devices and have full control of which apps access the data.

Google also updated its Search and AI Overviews functions to provide sharper health information as people ask increasingly complex questions.

"With recent health-focused advancements on Gemini models, we continue to further improve AI overviews on health topics so they're more relevant, comprehensive and continue to meet a high bar for clinical factuality," wrote Karen DeSalvo, MD, chief health officer at Google, in a blog post.

The company also said customers value hearing from their peers in addition to medical experts, so Google added a new feature titled "What People Suggest" to combine different perspectives on an issue from across online discussions.