Apple Health’s Approach to Patient Self-Reported Data – a Game Changer or Just More Noise?

Apple’s Health App, a native app on all iPhones, is a localized personal health record aggregating tracking, fitness, and health related information from a growing number of applications and devices. Since 2018 with the release of iOS 10, the Health app has been able to download data from a patient’s health-system medical records using the persons active patient portal as validation and conduit. The iOS 15.x upgrade now enables the patient to select items in the Health app to share with their physicians.  Physicians are then able to open an Apple Designed and maintained Physician Dashboard in their electronic record. This functionality opens many clinical, regulatory, financial, and management questions.

By David Voran^[1]

Apple’s native iPhone Health app is a personal health record enabling user to passively collect and aggregate data from an ever-expanding number of tracking apps and connected devices into one source for the user to review. Since 2018, the health app has been able to connect with healthcare systems and reference laboratories to pull in clinical information, labs, test results, and office-based measurements. The only requirement was the patient had an active portal account with the source and the healthcare system had enabled the download capability, which over a thousand had done so in the United States. User satisfaction with this capability was quite high in at least one report.

With iOS 15 and higher, people could now begin sharin