Apple is quietly working on turning your iPhone into the one-stop shop for all your medical info – CNBC

June 16, 2017 | Healthcare, Information Technology (IT), Technology

CNBC has learned that a secretive team within Apple’s growing health unit has been in talks with developers, hospitals and other industry groups about bringing clinical data, such as detailed lab results and allergy lists, to the iPhone, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the team. And from there, users could choose to share it with third parties, like hospitals and health developers.

With this move, Apple is trying to tackle a huge problem that the medical community has been grappling with for years. Even in the digital age, patients find their info cannot be easily shared between doctors, especially among different hospitals or clinics. This information tends to still live in PDF files attached to emails or delivered by fax machine. Those who do have access through so-called “patient portals” sometimes find that the user experience is poor and the information is limited. This problem is often referred to as the “interoperability crisis” — and it is hurting patients, health experts have said.

The company has also hired some of the top developers involved with FHIR, an increasingly popular protocol for exchanging electronic health records. These people include Sean Moore, an Apple software engineer who previously worked at medical records giant Epic Systems, and Ricky Bloomfield, a physician from Duke University with a background in medical informatics.

Source  Apple is quietly working on turning your iPhone into the one-stop shop for all your medical info

This entry was posted in Healthcare, Information Technology (IT), Technology on June 16, 2017 by Christian Sellu.