Apple will provide Health Records feature to veterans in conjunction with VA
Working with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Apple announced that the Health Records on iPhone feature will be available soon to veterans.
Veterans across the US will be able to see medical information from participating institutions -- including the VA -- organized into one view all in the Health app. VA patients will get a single, integrated snapshot of their health profile including information on allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures and vitals, and is displayed along with other information in the Health app like Apple Watch data.
"We have great admiration for veterans, and we're proud to bring a solution like Health Records on iPhone to the veteran community," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "It's truly an honor to contribute to the improved healthcare of America's heroes."
Apple says that Health Records on iPhone will be the first record-sharing platform of its kind available to the VA. The VA is the largest medical system in the United States, providing service to more than 9 million veterans across 1,243 facilities.
Discussion that the feature was coming to veterans surfaced in November 2018.
Debuted with iOS 11.3 in March, Health Records aggregates and stores encrypted patient data in the iOS Health app, effectively making that information portable and immediately accessible to end users. With Health Records, users are able to quickly review medical records and other pertinent information with doctors and caregivers, bypassing backend hurdles that can bog down access to treatment.
Apple launched Health Records with support from 39 health groups, with another 36 backing the technology in August. While a handful of larger regional groups integrated with the portability program, major nationwide networks are still out of the loop.
AppleInsider will be testing the integration with the feature and the VA's systems as soon as possible. It isn't clear how long the deployment of the feature will take, as the VA presently relies on a combination of digital records, and paper records going back decades -- with the records sometimes spanning multiple facilities and duty stations.
Veterans across the US will be able to see medical information from participating institutions -- including the VA -- organized into one view all in the Health app. VA patients will get a single, integrated snapshot of their health profile including information on allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures and vitals, and is displayed along with other information in the Health app like Apple Watch data.
"We have great admiration for veterans, and we're proud to bring a solution like Health Records on iPhone to the veteran community," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. "It's truly an honor to contribute to the improved healthcare of America's heroes."
Apple says that Health Records on iPhone will be the first record-sharing platform of its kind available to the VA. The VA is the largest medical system in the United States, providing service to more than 9 million veterans across 1,243 facilities.
Discussion that the feature was coming to veterans surfaced in November 2018.
Debuted with iOS 11.3 in March, Health Records aggregates and stores encrypted patient data in the iOS Health app, effectively making that information portable and immediately accessible to end users. With Health Records, users are able to quickly review medical records and other pertinent information with doctors and caregivers, bypassing backend hurdles that can bog down access to treatment.
Apple launched Health Records with support from 39 health groups, with another 36 backing the technology in August. While a handful of larger regional groups integrated with the portability program, major nationwide networks are still out of the loop.
AppleInsider will be testing the integration with the feature and the VA's systems as soon as possible. It isn't clear how long the deployment of the feature will take, as the VA presently relies on a combination of digital records, and paper records going back decades -- with the records sometimes spanning multiple facilities and duty stations.
Comments
On the other hand, if it improves the quality of care veterans are receiving, I'm all for it.
Disclaimer: I am a veteran who eschews the VA in favor of my employer's health care, which, even though it costs more, is miles and miles better than the VA.
I saw somewhere that Kaiser Oregon Is a participant -- but nothing about Kaiser Northern California.
I suspect that the providers will ease into implementation (as they probably should) and it will be a few years until regulations and current systems/databases get seamlessly integrated...
But we've got to start somewhere.
I particularly am excited that private industry (especially Apple) rather the various Federal, State, Local governments and agencies is driving this effort!
If you have any significant level of interaction with the healthcare system, I can assure that your record is far from accurate. So, why would you want to propagate and distribute these inaccuracies?
The main benefit of this though is to let the patient see his medical records (even though he will see only a selected subset of them -- they are not his records but the property of the provider and the provider still decides what the patient will see and what he doesn't see). But, meanwhile, the complete record will have already been sent to any new providers you interact with.
Yes, Apple is doing a good thing making these records available to the patient. But they are doing nothing to improve the deficiencies inherent in the system.
Be careful what you ask for.
But one can hope that patients actually seeing their records, even if it's incomplete, will start to show some of those deficiencies and get them corrected.
However, ever cynical, I believe it's more likely the providers will restrict what the user sees even more, or shut down the program completely, with some excuse about it not working, or people being confused about the data.
If you've spent your military career in one locale or command, you're right, it is easy for VA information to promulgate. However, if you have a multi-year and multi-command career spanning a large geographic area, it is anything but easy, and takes a great deal of persistence to get all of the information out of the system.
You're welcome to not trust Apple, but putting your faith in the federal system with the myriad breaches that they've had of OPM data which were actually hacks and miscreants taking advantage of lax IT security seems myopic.