We’re nearly halfway through the year, and Google Health has launched nearly on schedule. The highly anticipated health tool is now live and accessible to all Google users. There are four basic categories to utilize: Your personal Health profile, Importing of medical records, Exploring online health services, and Doctor search.

Google explains that, yes, this is another “personal health record,” a way for patients to store and manage their medical information in one place. But Google seems to be trying to address one of the big problems with PHRs: maintaining them is a big pain.

The information you provide under your health records is used for your own personal purposes, and can be printed and taken with you to a doctor’s appointment. If an office is integrated with Google health, then the information is already accessible to them In terms of the extended health services provided through Google’s health portal, registering for any of these, and linking it to your Google health profile provides you with automated updates to that third party service.

The biggest hurdle of all may be that only 14% of medical practices keep records electronically, the WSJ noted earlier this year. The real moment for these services isn’t likely to come until larger numbers of docs finally shift to electronic records that can easily be transferred to personal health records.

As there are only a handful of services that can be connected to your Google Health profile, including ePillBox and Walgreen’s Pharmacy, the potential for increased user base and added value of integration with Google Health makes it a potentially covted place for which third-party services are accessed.

Still, some worrywarts have pointed out that Google and Microsoft, which offers something called HealthVault, won’t be subject to the strictures of the federal health privacy law known as HIPAA.