It doesn't work that way now. And that's the problem. I should own my own health history. It's mine. Why should a hospital retain access to my health history if I choose to stop dealing with them? Its my own health data and I should be permitted to choose who has access to it.
Simple answer: medicolegal reasons. Hospitals need to retain ALL documentation generated by a patient encounter, whether it's electronic or on paper, in case the institution gets sued and must supply this documentation for discovery.
Your health history may be yours, but what it's documented on is owned by the hospital, doctor's office, clinic, surgicenter, etc. If you've ever stayed in a hospital, I invite you to try going back and asking to have your medical records handed over. The hospital's HIS department would be happy to make copies for you, but you won't be walking out with the original documents. Period. Nor will they be deleting your chart from their EHR simply because you ask them to.
This isn't just a technological problem. It's a law issue. If Apple and other tech companies work with Congress to build a standard on how patient information must be managed, read and written to, this could become comparable to banking. Patient data is stored in the cloud and patients can give access to that data to whichever health professional they choose. And because it's in the cloud, access to it can be revoked.
This will never happen. Sorry. The most that will happen is that patients will be able to carry a summarized version of their medical records/hospital charts with them in some kind of encrypted format, which would be useful for some portability of a patient's health information, but that's about it.
You don't appear to have any idea how much data is generated by a patient and hospital staff in a single hospital visit.
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Because the data provided by these devices replaces the day-to-day need for an expensive primary care physician. Example:
-My wifi scale charts weight. There was a period where I started to gain weight and body fat, so I exercised more, ate less. No doctor needed.
-I ran an app that kept track of caffeine intake. It said I shouldn't drink so much in the afternoon. Did that, slept better. No doctor needed.
-One app keeps track of what you ate. I found I was getting too little iron and calcium and the multivitamin I was taking didn't have any. Switched to a different vitamin. No doctor needed.
I have a better view of my health than one weight measurement every 12 months and 60 seconds of "what's wrong?" can provide a physician. I only told him what I did after the fact.
Proper care should be encouraging people to take steps like this, not saying that technology is useless.
And there's nothing wrong with this. All I am saying is that the sensors on these consumer-grade devices are not accurate or durable enough to provide useful data to a primary care provider that may be following a high acuity patient.
If you're using an app that's helping you lose weight or cut down on caffeine intake, that's great. I can see plenty of practical applications for these devices in health maintenance. For higher acuity situations, such as postoperative monitoring of blood pressures, pain scores, intake/output, etc., though - not good, accurate, or safe enough to provide useful data to a physician.
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i think Apple needs to pay strict attention to law changes goin forward in these areas of Health, Health Records and data access from 3rd Parties - anything beyond Apple + Doctors i consider 3rd parties.
Don't worry, Apple has absolutely no interest in getting into the health records and information business. Neither does Microsoft, Google, or any of the other big tech companies. They're all more interested in providing tools for third parties to develop informatics, analytics, and decision support systems. Why? Because they won't have to be the ones to jump through all the regulatory hurdles with government agencies like the FDA, which is VERY expensive.