Adding health records to Apple’s health app didn’t excite advocates for greater patient access to their medical data, but Harvard Medical School professor Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, argues it could be a major breakthrough in promoting sharing of health records and eventually allow patients to see all their health data collected from many different sources.

Writing for CNBC, Mandl said previous efforts he was involved in to “shake loose data from the computer systems in doctors' offices” didn’t pan out. Apple’s effort could because on the rampant expansion in health IT over the past decade and its use of a program Mandl helped create called SMART, which can make electronic health records (EHRs) “work like iPhones do.”

“Apple uses SMART to connect the health app to hospitals and doctors' offices,” he wrote. “The good news for patients, doctors and innovators is that Apple chose a standardized, open connection over a proprietary, closed one. This approach lets any other app, whether running on the web, iPhone, or Android, use that same interface to connect. So Apple will compete on value and customer satisfaction, rather than on an exclusive lock on the data.”

Fulfilling that promise, Mandl said, will take plenty of effort by Apple, health systems and policymakers. Read more at link below: