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Survey Finds 78% of Patients Satisfied With Apple Health Records at UC San Diego Hospital
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Epic is not interested in interoperability. They see themselves as the one provider/vendor to throw out all others. In other words, they see themselves as the standard. And if you ever go to their campus or read about their CEO... well, it’s amazing they are as successful as they are.
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As with the ECG feature, there are MANY laws and regulations involved. It simply takes time to get through the bureaucracy. If the various other institutions are using FHIR or the HL7 suggestion then it will probably be very fast once the legal/regulatory red tape is complete.Should we expect to see this outside the US soon or is it another feature that will take as long to roll out as Apple Pay? Or the ECG feature.
From Apple's website: "Registration is available to U.S. healthcare institutions only."
Thank you Apple...
I’d say Epic is even less interested. If your want to work with Apple it will basically cost you $299 or $99 depending upon your needs for a developer program. Epic is far more costly. Same with Cerner. Due to NDAs I cannot disclose the amount but let’s just say they are very proud of their system and people would find Apple’s terms a bargain.
Healthcare may be the next major area where Apple can increase its technological presence. I know the Watch Series 4 makes a good step in that direction. As a medical student, healthcare is an exciting area technology wise and as an Apple fan and long time user, it would be great to see increased presence in that area.
This app has very little in common with an actual medical Health Record. eHRs on the whole absolutely suck, and have little to do with patient care- they were created by non-physicians in order to facilitate billing and data retrieval. Very few physicians are happy with being forced to use them, and Epic is for all intents and purposes Skynet.
Also, there are very few Apple compatible software solutions in the medical field- everything is being pushed to Windows (7!), Nuance has discontinued Dragon Dictate Medical for Mac, and the one Mac-compatible eHr I am aware of (MacPractice) is very expensive.
FWIW- I still use paper charts, and am willing to pay the penalty for not having an eHr. My colleagues envy me, and my patients appreciate that I pay attention to them instead of a laptop.
Wonder what customer satisfaction % will be if there's ever a Yahoo scale data breech. I wonder if a FBI subpoena will also allow law enforcement to all medical records along with your last iCloud backup. Since everything seems hackable these days, are people really comfortable with their sensitive health history sitting in the cloud?
So in that case how do I connect Apple Health to my Epic patient accounts?
Let me know when Johns Hopkins chimes in. I'd trust them more than surveys or government data.
Johns Hopkins is using it at least some of their areas (I'm an Oncology patient so I can't speak for the entire hospital). They use Epic and getting my records through the health app is good. LabCorp and Quest also participate. You are not locked into using Apple Health. You can still access your data over their individual websites.
It still needs some work but many of the problems are the same ones you have with paper records. Lab results are grouped by day not test, so it's hard to compare vitals from visits. The same with vitals per visit. Going to the Johns Hopkins (Epic) website does allow we to compare results between visits so it works out better.
The data does not carry over to the primary part of the Health App so again you can not compare vitals from imported sources like Hopkins with vitals taken locally.
I have been a patient there for more than 5 years, dealing with the paper records would be impossible. Before the web access over their individual websites and the Apple app, I would verbally get results and enter them into a spreadsheet. Because of some of the Apple health app shortcomings mentioned above, I can't really say I am satisfied, but its great to be able to access the data through my phone, a huge improvement over paper records which I would rated as terrible, and over the 2 years that I have been using I have seen improvements in the way the data is displayed. I have no doubt that based on feedback, there will be changes to improve the display of the data.
Probably a dumb question but are you speaking in the perspective of a provider/doctor or as a patient yourself?
As a patient:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208680
Each Epic installation is institutionally managed so you have to make sure the institution is supported and then authenticate.
As for the reason why an institution may not be supported, that decision is solely on them and the administrators. Either they don’t have the right version of Epic (it’s pricey) or they don’t know it exists.
If you use MyChart Central there is no way to integrate that into Apple Health.
Well...if you are suspected of committing a crime, and a judge deems the FBI having access to your health records pertinent to their investigation and then signs a warrant, then the FBI can simply seize your paper health records sitting in a file cabinet, or an electronic version sitting on a health professional's (or hospital's) server.
Happens all the time in research studies, but few people read beyond the headline of such things.
The UK and the NHS are both involved with HL7 (who define the CDA format), but the UK will have a specific implementation (a small subset of the available coded-data types which CDA can contain).
It's not Apples fault this isn't available globally, the NHS isn't exactly well funded to cope with this!
- https://developer.nhs.uk/library/interoperability/itk-payloads-hl7v3-and-cda/
- https://bitbucket.org/itk/itk-payloads/wiki/Home
- https://github.com/HL7-UK