After numerous months of rumors, tech giant Apple has finally announced that it will be launching a personal health record (PHR) feature with its iOS 11.3. The beta of this feature has already been launched to users in Apple’s iOS Developer Program.
The particular feature is called Health Records and it will aggregate the existing patient-generated data in a specific Health app that already contains medical data from a user’s electronic medical record. This functionality will only be available to patients getting treatment at the participating hospitals.
During the launch of the BETA version, Apple announced that it was working with 12 hospitals across the USA. These 12 hospitals include Geisinger Health System, Cedars-Sinai L.A., Penn Medicine and Johns Hopkins.
Apple COO Jeff Williams said, “Our goal is to help consumers live a better day. We’ve worked closely with the health community to create an experience everyone has wanted for years — to view medical records easily and securely right on your iPhone. By empowering customers to see their overall health, we hope to help consumers better understand their health and help them lead healthier lives.”
The new app will utilize HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification. Using this feature, people will see things such as medications, allergies, conditions, and immunizations. This will further include things patients might check an EHR patient portal. This includes lab results. Patients will also be notified at times when the hospital has successfully updated their data. All this medical data will be completely encrypted for security reasons and patients would need to enter a tough password to view it.
It was reported that majority of the hospitals that were participating in launch had a history of utilizing digital health innovation. For instance, Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai had been a key user of Apple products for quite some time. The main reason for doing so is communication and entertainment purposes as patients are given iPads to entertain themselves at the hospital and also communicate with doctors and curses. The feature even has a complete patient app for the Apple Watch.
In a statement, Cedars-Sinai Chief Information Officer Darren Dworkin, reportedly said “Putting the patient at the center of their care by enabling them to direct and control their own health records has been a focus for us at Cedars-Sinai for some time.”
“We are thrilled to see Apple taking the lead in this space by enabling access for consumers to their medical information on their iPhones. Apple is uniquely positioned to help scale adoption because they have both a secure and trusted platform and have adopted the latest industry open standards at a time when the industry is well positioned to respond,” he added.
