In January, Apple launched a project to bring information from patient health records — such as allergies, immunizations and lab results — into the iPhone's Health app. Since then, more than 100 hospitals and clinics have signed on to the initiative.
Apple uses application programming interfaces, known as APIs, provided by participating hospitals and clinics to facilitate its data exchange, creating a direct connection between the provider's EHR and the patient's iPhone. The project's APIs — or sets of protocols that help different applications communicate with one another — are based on FHIR, a popular interoperability standards framework used in healthcare.
To help hospitals and clinics go live on the health records feature, Apple is also collaborating with EHR vendors like Epic, Cerner and athenahealth.
Hospitals and clinics that are interested in enabling Apple's health records feature will soon be able to register to have their organization listed on the Health app's directory on their own, company said. However, for now, institutions must work with their EHR vendor to register for the project. Apple has not announced when self-registration for hospitals and clinics will be available.
Apple does not charge institutions fees for registering or maintaining a connection with the project, according to the company's website. To learn more about the project, Apple suggests emailing healthrecords@apple.com.
To see the 132 hospitals, clinics and healthcare companies that are live on Apple's health records feature as of Nov. 8, click here.