EHR giant Epic explains how it will bring Apple HealthKit data to doctors

Apple’s HealthKit has tremendous potential to help close the gap between consumer collected data and data collected in traditional healthcare settings,” said Epic president Carl Dvorak in an email to 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.

Basically - Apple’s HealthKit acts as a routing point for several non-compliable standards and closed systems, which can suddenly connect and exchange data.

“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,” he said.

Notice that the weight data that the scale collects doesn’t sit in the HealthKit cloud; it’s on the user’s phone.

“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,” Spranger said.