Apple Wants to Join the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Tech giant Apple is reportedly aiming to join the doctor-patient relationship as an interface between users and their physicians, with future updates aiming to provide users with options to send summaries of their health data to their doctor.

Fast Company reports that this week Apple revealed a number of new health features that currently don’t make total sense, adding new ways to measure mobility health and announcing that in iOS 15 users will be able to send a summary of their data to doctors that will be viewable inside their electronic health record. Patients will also be able to share health data with friends and family.

All of these features point towards Apple increasingly aiming to serve as an interface between patients and their doctors. Apple’s Health app can already pull patient health data from a growing list of healthcare providers in the United States, but the new version of the Health app will be able to send a summary of daily health data back to doctors.

This new update could place the Apple Health app at the center of patients’ ongoing conversations with their doctors. Patients would be able to send information about their eating and exercise habits to their physicians where it would be viewable inside their electronic health record.

This new data-sharing capability is being supported by a number of electronic health record companies including Cerner, the second-largest of these companies n the United States. However, Epic, the biggest health record company in the country, is absent from the list of companies working with Apple and is apparently the wariest of Apple’s move into the healthcare industry.

Epic has its own health app for collecting and sharing patient data called MyChart and is part of the company’s expansion outside of the hospital and into the hands of patients. MyChart already integrated with some Apple products and can currently read data from the Apple Health app and Apple Watch wearable device. However, it’s not clear whether Epic is willing to share patient data with Apple.