Google will make changes to its search results on the search engine and Google Maps to show virtual healthcare options more prominently, in an effort to make it easier for people to connect to virtual healthcare options, the company said in a statement. The changes will start rolling out this week. The company said that ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has seen interest in virtual care and telehealth "rise dramatically". The new updates: Google will allow healthcare providers, such as hospitals, doctors, and mental health professionals to enter a virtual care offering in their Business Profile, and that link will appear in both search results and Google Maps. In case health care providers have a dedicated COVID-19 webpage, Google said it’ll automatically surface a link to that, in both the search results and Maps. What this essentially means is that if, for instance, a hospital offers virtual care to patients and updates the same on their business profile, Google will show an option called "get online care" in search results for that particular hospital. Similarly, if a hospital has a dedicated website for COVID-19, that will be visible in the search results itself. However, at the time of publication, we could not see these changes when we tried searching for some hospitals in India, including AIIMS Delhi, Medanata Hospital, and Fortis Hospital. [caption id="attachment_213150" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Source: Google Blog[/caption] We don't know if Google business profiles of all healthcare professionals are verified, and a report by the…
