Apple Wants Your iPhone to Become a Medical Records Device
Your medical records could eventually find its way onto your Apple iPhone for easy sharing with your doctor. That’s the goal of a secretive team within Cupertino’s growing health unit, according to CNBC.
Currently, Apple’s in talks with developers, hospitals, and other groups to bring clinical data to iPhone. This would include detailed lab results, allergy lists, and more. By doing so, your smartphone would become a central tool to share your medical data with third parties.
As CNBC explains:
Essentially, Apple would be trying to re-create what it did with music — replacing CDs and scattered MP3s with a centralized management system in iTunes and the iPod — in the similarly fragmented and complicated landscape for health data.
To make this happen, Apple is looking at start-ups in the cloud hosting space for a possible acquisition.
Thanks to Apple HealthKit, iPhone owners can already store fitness and wellness data. Doing something similar with medical records would help to eliminate a growing problem within the medical community, which many are calling an “interoperability crisis.”
The digital age has led to many advances in the medical field. Unfortunately, it’s still difficult to share patient data between doctors because of differing systems and practices between providers.
Aneesh Chopra, who served as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, notes that lack of data-sharing between health care providers can lead to unnecessary mistakes and missed diagnoses.
“As health care goes digital, the promise has always been to give patients and the doctors they trust full access to their health information,” he said.
It will be interesting to see what plans Apple has for medical records sharing. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about this soon.
For other Apple news, see:
