While the Wall Street Journal was waxing poetic how Apple’s health industry push has stalled, we wouldn’t be underestimating its transformative potential in the field. Apple, after all, has proven numerous times that it may start slow and tread carefully, but the sheer scale of its market size eventually overcomes the pushback from new industries it is trying to break into.
The latest case in point are its Health Records app that now has access to your patient portal in the renowned Mayo Clinic network, adding to the list of the already announced Apple Health partners in the HMO intermediary realm.
The Mayo Clinic access would undoubtedly add plenty to the street cred of the Health Records app, and we don’t need to extoll the institution’s numerous virtues to back up this claim. This partnership is what resulted in the still-unsurpassed ECG function of the Apple Watch that took years to master with the help of Mayo Clinic physicians and databases that spearheaded the algorithm’s creation.
What can a Mayo network patient can expect from the integration of their data in the Apple Health Records app when the service becomes live this fall? Well, those with an online patient portal account at the Mayo Clinic now have the alternative of the Health Records app to view their health data from multiple providers.
Android users have the option of a similar app called CommonHealth but Apple has the advantage of sharing the health data derived from its Apple Watch like heart rate and detected falls directly with their physicians.
While Google hasn’t given up on digitizing your personal health data with a new hospital chain partnership, Apple may eat its lunch in the field by simply leveraging the abundance of information collected in its Health app.
That’s where all the Apple Watch sensor readings go, for instance, and Apple is now offering you the option to share your health data not only with your doctor, but with friends and family as well, so that users have “a trusted partner on their health journey.”
New Apple Health app data features in iOS 15:
- Walking Steadiness – new Mobility algorithms assess balance, stability, and coordination via the iPhone/Watch sensors.
- Trends – long-term changes in various health and fitness metrics that the Apple Health app integrates.
- Better Labs – bloodwork lab data tracking and analysis.
All of these new and old data points can now be securely shared with either your doctor, or your loved ones, so you can have both a specialist and a person that is closer to you, be up to date with your health and fitness points at the same time, for an increased scope of coverage in case something unforeseen happens.
By the fall, when iOS 15 and watchOS 8 hit your palm and your wrist, respectively, Apple will have likely scooped up many more partners for its Health Records sharing initiative, so we wouldn’t count them out in the health industry realm just yet.