Would you hand your medical records to a fitness tracker?
Google is betting yes. Starting next month, Fitbit's AI-powered Personal Health Coach will be able to pull in your complete medical history - lab results, medications, doctor visit notes - and use it to personalize health advice. The feature launches in public preview for U.S. users.
The pitch makes intuitive sense. Ask the coach "How can I improve my cholesterol?" and instead of generic wellness tips, it can reference your actual cholesterol labs, flag notable values, and track trends over time. That is genuinely more useful than what any fitness wearable offers today.
How It Actually Works
Google partnered with b.well and CLEAR to handle the medical records pipeline. You can either search for your healthcare provider and link to their patient portal directly, or verify your identity through CLEAR (which requires an ID and a selfie), and the app will pull records on your behalf. Google says the data is stored securely within Fitbit, won't be used for ads, and users control how it's shared or deleted.
Three other updates shipped alongside the records feature:
- Better sleep tracking: A 15% improvement in sleep staging accuracy for Public Preview users
- Continuous glucose monitoring: Starting in April, you can connect a CGM through Health Connect and ask the coach how specific meals or workouts affect your glucose levels
- Research backing: Fitbit's study on predicting insulin resistance using wearable data was published in Nature
The Privacy Trade-off
Google is not the first to make this play. Amazon, OpenAI, and Microsoft have all moved toward integrating health data into their AI products. The competitive logic is clear: the more personal data an AI has, the more useful (and sticky) it becomes.
But medical records are not fitness metrics. Your resting heart rate is one thing. Your medication list, lab abnormalities, and visit history are another category entirely. Google says the right things about data control and ad exclusions, but this is still a company whose primary business is advertising asking for your most sensitive personal information.
The feature is opt-in, which is the bare minimum. The real question is whether the personalization gains are worth the concentration of health data inside yet another Google product.