At the Web 2.0 Summit currently taking place in San Francisco (Oct. 17-19), Google announced the current development of the Google Health app, which will offer online archiving of medical records (something that Google points out would have come in handy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for example), plus a host of other services, including: symptom/condition search, maps locating nearby doctors, patient ratings and appointment availability.

Of particular interest is the ability to archive x-ray images for use as a research tool–at the moment, the petabytes of x-ray data remain uncollected by any central service.

Security concerns will of course arise.

The launch date for the beta site is not yet public.

Via PopSci