Apple working to have your iPhone manage your medical history

Apple working to have your iPhone manage your medical history

PanARMENIAN.Net - Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information -- every doctor's visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital web sites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one, CNBC reports.

Apple is working on making that scenario a reality.

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.

One of the people said Apple is looking at startups in the cloud hosting space about potential acquisitions that might fit into this plan.

Essentially, Apple would be trying to recreate 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.

"If Apple is serious about this, it would be a big f---ing deal," said Farzad Mostashari, former National Coordinator of Health IT for the Department of Health and Human Services and the founder of a start-up called Aledade.

Such a move would represent a deviation in strategy from Apple's previous efforts in health care, the people said, which have focused on fitness and wellness. Apple's HealthKit, for instance, is primarily used to store things like steps and sleep. There's also a feature called "health records," which includes the option to import documents that include summaries of care, but that is a limited snapshot of medical information.

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