Apple's HealthKit will use Epic's MyChart app to allow data exchange between a provider's Epic EHR and the patient's Health app.
"Apple's HealthKit has tremendous potential to help close the gap between consumer collected data and data collected in traditional healthcare settings," Epic President Carl Dvorak told VentureBeat. "The Epic customer community, which provides care to over 170 million patients a year, will be able to use HealthKit through Epic's MyChart application — the most used patient portal in the U.S."
There will not be direct integration between Epic EHR systems and the HealthKit platform; all data will go through the MyChart mobile patient portal, according to the report. Patient data will also not be sent or stored in iCloud, Apple's cloud storage platform.
Epic spokesperson Brian Spranger gave this example to VentureBeat: "A consumer health app, like the Withings Scale, will notify HealthKit that it has a new weight and ask HealthKit to store that weight in the database on the iPhone…If the patient has given permission for the MyChart app on their phone to know about that data, HealthKit 'wakes up' the MyChart app and tells it there's new data."
Only if both the user and the provider agree to exchange data will any information be pushed between HealthKit and MyChart, according to the report.
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