Apple, Google, others join White House digital health data push

In what will later be seen as a highly significant move to unlock Apple’s ambitions in digital health, the Trump Administration has created a voluntary industry network of companies to make health data more interoperable.

What this should mean is that data from different health providers will be more easily assimilated within any single trusted app or service. The idea is that you’ll be able to take your chosen app (such as Apple’s Health) and find data, test results, and other information collected by different US health providers.

The problem that exists is that much of this data is held in proprietary systems, so it’s not easily shared across app and services.

The digital disruption of health

“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their healthcare experience,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “For too long, patients in this country have been burdened with a healthcare system that has not kept pace with the disruptive innovations that have transformed nearly every other sector of our economy. With the commitments made by these entrepreneurial companies today, we stand ready for a paradigm shift in the US healthcare system for the benefit of patients and providers.” 

The intention is to make all this data more interoperable, which should also make it more actionable, as well as more available to patients and caregivers. The initiative sees Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Anthropic, and OpenAI promising to work with health systems and the administration to bring all the fragmented data together.

The barrier toward better interoperability seems to have been the need to keep that data secure; with this agreement government and tech firms now hope to improve data sharing and expand the kinds of apps patients can use.

A Bloomberg report particularly cites apps designed to help people manage obesity and diabetes with help from artificial intelligence, both of which could easily be on the Apple health services radar.

What are the benefits?

The devil’s in the detail with all partners, including 60 companies and 11 health systems, committing to deliver results (though no specifically agreed upon outcome) by Q1 2026.

That’s all good. But the need to maintain privacy with health data remains a big sticking point, particularly as rogue nations such as the UK push for backdoors into data encryption, while competition regulators become increasingly insistent that system services — presumably including health services — should have access to platform-specific features to drive their own apps and services. 

In both cases, these missions look like large vehicles advancing at pace down a one-way country track toward an also speeding car of privacy. In the end, we may see the right to personal privacy being shunted off the track by the demands of corporate enterprise, which is concerning to me.

There are benefits in that the introduction of better interoperability will make it far more possible to create next-generation systems and services within the digital health sector. Caregivers will have improved access to information about patients and their condition, while self-care will be improved with the introduction of AI-driven personal health coaches that apply cutting-edge health science to actual biometric and health condition data.

Undiscovered chances

These systems should eventually become very capable of optimizing management of existing health conditions while also accurately warning of, and mitigating against, hitherto undiagnosed conditions. 

You can also widen the benefits out; assuming privacy is protected, it should become possible for health authorities to access fast and immediate real-world data on a local/regional basis as key health statistics are shared with them.

This may be of particular use if we experience another pandemic, as information of this kind should help authorities focus healthcare resources more effectively to prevent disease spread. While that won’t actually solve the worldwide funding crisis in public health, it might enable those resources that do exist to be used more effectively.

Calling Project Mulberry

Returning to Apple, CEO Tim Cook has been evangelizing Apple’s mission in digital health for a very long time and Apple has itself gone some way toward opening up digital health systems within its own Health app. News that this initiative has become a government/industry partnership should be welcome in Cupertino, as it could unlock opportunities in health the company might now intend to exploit next year, when its true “Project Mulberry” plans for the sector seem likely to come on stream.

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