When Google made its much blogged about healthcare announcement last week, it turned out to be somewhat more bland than the spirited speculation that came before it.

No launch of a search engine dedicated specifically to healthcare, but instead – as one headline put it – a jazzing up of search capabilities. At a meeting with reporters from around the world Google executives announced Google Co-op, which enables users to label Web pages and create specialized links to which other users can subscribe.

Industry insiders expect there’s more to come from Google on the healthcare front.

“My view is search-and-alert is going to become a particularly important piece of healthcare,” said Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, a Chicago-based developer of electronic health record systems.

Tullman ought to have some insight into what Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are planning to bring to the healthcare market. Brin spent more than four hours at the Allscripts booth at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in San Diego in February.

If there’s a Google-Allscripts partnership in the works, Tullman won’t say.

“A lot of smart people are figuring out how to work together,” he said. He noted it would take plenty of smarts and cooperation to put the mounds of healthcare data to work for the consumer – and the physician.

“Patients are walking in with five big stacks of information from the Internet that the doctor has not read,” Tullman said. “The model is not working right now.”

Tom Eng, founder, president and CEO, of health search engine Healia says generic search engines often provide questionable or even harmful data on health topics.

“Given the fact that we will soon experience a dramatic increase in the volume of health data and information – with impending EHRs and PHRs and online e-health offerings – I think the healthcare IT industry will increasingly need solutions that can aggregate and filter these various data and information streams to enable both providers and consumers to make better health decisions.

Tullman agrees on the need for a “trusted filter.” An organization such as Medem, could have a role in providing targeted information, he said.

Brad Burns at Revolution Health Group, the healthcare company founded by AOL founder Steve Case, said about Google’s initiative: “We believe any efforts to give consumers a greater choice and control with their healthcare is a good thing.”

Jennifer Meyer, a spokeswoman for WebMD, said Google’s quest for better healthcare information delivery will lead more people to WebMD, “a leading source of health content.”