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Patients and their healthcare data are now united: they will be able to view electronic medical records (EMR) and other clinical information on their phones.

CIOs, IT experts, doctors, medical facility administrators and most importantly the patients are happy about the change. The new software is a new step forward making it easier for the patients to see all their records at one time from one interface, which will make their life easier. said IT specialist from Bedrock IT.

Health Records

With its upcoming iOS 11.3 release, Apple has made it possible for patients to view the data on their iPhones and iPads. The new release will have access to health records through the existing Health app, which was released in 2014 on iOS 8.

With this new feature, medical facilities will be able to connect to the health app by an API and to the EMR systems. It will allow sharing of data between the patients and the providers. According to Apple, this new health record feature is at present available to the patience of 12 hospital systems.

The following medical facilities have signed on to beta test the Health Record feature “

• Johns Hopkins Medicine – Baltimore, Md.
• Cedars-Sinai – Los Angeles, Calif.
• Penn Medicine – Philadelphia, Pa.
• Geisinger Health System – Danville, Pa.
• UC San Diego Health – San Diego, Calif.
• UNC Health Care – Chapel Hill, N.C.
• Rush University Medical Center – Chicago, Ill.
• Dignity Health – Arizona, California and Nev.
• Ochsner Health System – Jefferson Parish, La.
• MedStar Health – Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia
• OhioHealth – Columbus, Ohio
• Cerner Healthe Clinic – Kansas City, Mo.

How to see the records

To access the health record, you will need iOS 11.3 beta. You need to go to the updated Health Records section within the Health app to see the records. You can see data from multiple providers. The data from multiple providers is available to the patients whenever they choose to see it.

Different scenarios

John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup Healthcare System and CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School, said, EMR sharing will sometimes be solely between healthcare providers and sometimes be provider to patient and back to provider.

In a provider to provider scenario, one expert will be able to share information with another expert. For example, a cardiologist will be able to share information with a oncologists and so on. In a provider to patient to provider scenario, a doctor will be able to share test results with a patient and the patient then can schedule a follow-up appointment with the same doctor. With IOS 11.3, provider to patient to provider approach has been accelerated significantly.

Even though health care facilities need to roll out EMRs by law, the meaningful user standards used by them may not be similar. The records of the patients are also not easily shared between different healthcare facilities.

Better for patients

previously because five different providers had different EMRs and ways to access them, a patient needed to log into five different portals of five different providers to see all the records. Now with Apple’s new Health Records feature, a patient will be able to see all the medical data from multiple providers at one place and whenever he or she wants.