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Americans on average will visit a care provider about 300 times over the course of their lives.
That’s hundreds of blood pressure readings, numerous diagnoses, and hundreds of entries into a patient’s medical record—and that’s potentially with dozens of different doctors.
So it’s understandable, inevitable even, that patients would struggle to keep every provider up-to-date on their medical history.
This issue is compounded by much of our healthcare information being fragmented among multiple, incompatible health systems’ electronic health records.
The majority of these systems store and exchange health information in unique, often proprietary ways—and thus don’t effectively talk with one another.
Fortunately, recent news from Apple points to a reprieve for patients struggling to keep all of their providers up-to-date. Apple has teamed with roughly a dozen hospitals across the country, including the likes of Geisinger Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, to make patient’s medical history available to them on their phone.
Patients can bring their phone with them to participating health systems and provide caregivers with an up-to-date medical history.
Empowering patients with the ability to carry their health records on their phone is great, and will surely help them overcome the issue of fragmented healthcare records.
Via Lionel Reichardt / le Pharmageek
