Apple wants to make your iPhone a “one-stop shop” for all your medical data.
A secret team is working to make multiple logins for different medical services a thing of the past by turning the iPhone into a central hub of information about doctor’s visits, lab test results, prescription data, and more.
Apple is serious about health, and it has been pushing hard to make our mobile devices tools for logging and sharing our health and fitness data, and improving our lifestyles. But we know its ambitions are even greater. Apple wants to play an integral role in keeping you healthy.
“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,” reports CNBC.
The data could then be easily shared with doctors, nurses, and other sources. According to “a half-dozen people” who are familiar with the team, Apple is eyeing up startup companies that specialize in cloud hosting that could be acquired to achieve this goal.
Apple is essentially trying to recreate what it did with music and the iPod, CNBC adds, by taking a “fragmented and complicated” landscape and making it simpler and easily accessible through a centralized system.
Data can already be recorded inside the Health app on iOS, and shared with others. But the options are limited, and users still have to use third-party services to access information from their doctor or hospital, or to manage prescriptions and other data.
Apple is “trying to tackle a huge problem that the medical community has been grappling for years.” It is often referred to as the “interoperability crisis,” and health experts believe it is hurting patients and leading to unnecessary mistakes and misdiagnosis.
Apple’s efforts to improve health and medical services have led to the hiring of Dr. Sumbul Desai, former executive director of Stanford Medicine’s Center for Digital Health, and Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, former Director of Mobile Strategy at Duke University.
The company is also said to be working on a revolutionary new diabetes treatment using sensors that can monitor blood sugar levels without actually drawing blood.
