Cerner on your iPhone? Partnership with Apple will help patients, doctors share data
Kansas City’s Cerner Corp. is among the first healthcare IT companies to work with tech giant Apple on a new feature that will allow patients to share their personal health data with family members and providers.
Apple recently announced that its iOS 15 operating system will include new capabilities that allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to better identify, measure and understand changes in personal health data.
When those products hit the market this fall, users will be able to not only track metrics like heart rates and steps, but they can elect to share certain data with trusted healthcare providers or family members.
That’s where Cerner, which pioneered electronic healthcare records, comes in. The North Kansas City firm helped transition patient records maintained by hospitals and doctors to electronic records that can be easily shared without paper. It’s now transitioning some of that work to consumer mobile devices.
Last year, as Amazon introduced its Halo Band, a wearable device that helps consumers track sleep, physical activity and emotional well being, Cerner powered that device’s ability to share data with healthcare professionals.
But the partnership with Apple will go much further because of the sheer amount of data its devices can collect, said Jessica Oveys, director of product market management at Cerner.
Both Apple and Cerner have protocols to keep personal health data secure, she said.
“From a security perspective, Apple has been very clear that they don’t have access to the data,” she said. “It’s stored and managed in such a way that it really is patient-specific, consumer-specific. It’s not like we have engineers here that access that information. So that design has been critical to them. “
The partnership with Apple comes as more healthcare providers are trying to empower patients to take control of their own treatment and data. That’s why users are allowed to decide with whom and what kind of information they share.
“What that means for a patient is that they have the right to choose an app of their choice and gain access to their clinical data and use it however they want,” said Sam Lambson, Cerner’s vice president of interoperability. “And that paired kind of with the incentives of health and well being that are built into a lot of (health insurance) plans and high-deductible plans comes together quite nicely for patients to actually take control.”
Like other wellness initiatives, this one aims at helping prevent and detect larger problems.
Lambson said Apple’s devices can help patients track exercise or diet. Those deemed at risk for diabetes can monitor blood glucose rates and choose to share their information with doctors, nurses or dietitians.
“That’s a powerful enabler for people to take charge of their own care,” he said, “and then work it in their clinical conversations.”
Like patients, providers will have the choice of whether to embrace this new frontier of healthcare records. Doctors can choose to import and examine someone’s data or they may elect to maintain only traditional medical records.
Apple’s health features allow users to share data in whatever way they choose. The company says that could help a child track the activity or heart health data of an aging parent. Someone could share fertility insights with a partner. Or a person with Parkinson’s disease could share mobility data with a physical therapist.
“This past year has emphasized the importance of health, and we’re enabling our users to take a more active role in their well-being. We’ve added powerful features that give users the most comprehensive set of insights to better understand their health trends over time,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, said in a news release. “Many people around the world are caring for someone, and we want to provide a secure and private way for users to have a trusted partner on their health journey.”
