Apple in talks to give U.S. veterans access to electronic medical records

“Apple Inc. is in discussions with the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide portable electronic health records to military veterans, a partnership that would simplify patients’ hospital visits and allow the technology giant to tap millions of new customers, according to people familiar with the effort and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” Ben Kesling and Tripp Mickle report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Under the plans being discussed, Apple would create special software tools allowing the VA’s estimated nine million veterans currently enrolled in the system to transfer their health records to iPhones and provide engineering support to the agency,” Kesling and Mickle report. “Apple in January announced its foray into the electronic-records field with a feature that allows patients to import and store medical information.”
“Top VA officials, as well as associates from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, discussed the project last year in a series of emails reviewed by the Journal,” Kesling and Mickle report. “The VA partnership has the potential to accelerate Apple’s efforts to overcome past challenges by allowing it to tap into one of the nation’s largest, concentrated patient populations, health-care experts said… ‘With nine million users, they will have the largest mobile platform for storing records on personal phones,’ said Iltifat Husain, assistant professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine and co-founder of Impathiq, a health-data analytics company.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, Apple and the VA can ink this deal to provide U.S. vets secure portable electronic health records.
One of the biggest issues in healthcare in the U.S. today is that there is no “Quartberback” – someone running the effort, coordinating the various specialists, making sure everyone is on the same page with the treatment plan(s), drug interactions, allergies, etc. A “playbook” showing the full picture of the patient’s health data would be very useful – and let the disparate medical personnel each quarterback on their own. Hopefully, Apple can step in, build, and fulfill this need with the company’s vaunted security and privacy. — MacDailyNews, August 22, 2016
How much this would improve healthcare cannot be overstated. Apple will save lives here. — MacDailyNews, June 15, 2017
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