Over the past few weeks, reports of Apple working on a completely new project that turns your iPhone into a repository of medical record data have surfaced on the interwebs. It has been said that Cupertino wants the iPhone to become a ‘one-stop shop’ for your health reports and CNBC now has another insider scoop about these efforts.
According to the fresh report, citing two sources aware of the developments, Apple’s health-focused team has been working with a small healthcare startup called Health Gorilla.
The latter’s platform is solely aimed at providing doctors with a detailed/complete picture of the patient’s health history digitally. It enabled the patient to aggregate all of their test results, prescriptions and other necessary documents in one location, making it easy to manage for yourself as well as sharing the same with a new doctor.
In partnership with Apple, Health Gorilla is said to be working on the integration of medical records into the iPhone. This means it will include blood reports, X-rays, and other test results, for which the duo seems to be partnering with hospitals, imaging centers, and lab-testing companies such as Quest and LabCorp. And this sounds like we are approaching utopia and medical advancements will definitely leave you amazed.
With these healthcare-focused efforts, Apple is looking to weed out one of the most annoying problems with the medical industry, which is the interoperability of data. It means if you visit the hospital and they need to check up on your previous records they will have to touch base with several third-party labs and specialist, which is a chore in itself. This, at times, even leads to delays in their diagnosis and treatment. And haste could lead to medical errors.
Thus, sources tell CNBC that interoperability will be the key to Apple’s platform and the patient will be the center of their own care. Earlier, the Cupertino giant was laying extreme focus on its fitness efforts but it now seems to be deviating towards solving a bigger problem that plagues the industry.
And what better way to amalgamate their technology (hardware) and software services available at hand. Apple could simply make its Health app, which already integrates health data from your Apple Watch, more robust by allowing you to store all of your health records on the iPhone — which seems to the goal here. The report adds,
The goal is to give iPhone users the tools to review, store and share their own medical information, including lab results, allergy lists and so on.
Founded in 2011, Health Gorilla was launched by a trio of co-founders, namely Alex Minkin, Andrei Zudin, Steven Yaskin. The aim of the platform is to act as a collaborative clinical network that enables doctors, clinical staff, patients, health systems, and vendors to share medical information with one another. While the platform is targetted towards specialists and hospitals, it even boasts of being able to deliver a comprehensive medical report to users within ten minutes.
Apple, on the other hand, is not the only technology giant who’s directing funds and personnel towards healthcare efforts. Both of its primary arch-rivals, Microsoft (Health Vault) and Google (Verily), have been working on their own projects. Even Nokia is also working in the healthcare field as it bought out Withings earlier last year. The Withings name has today withered away and Nokia has gives us a glimpse into what Nokia Health might look like.
