Apple made a big splash in healthcare circles this past week when it announced that the company is entering the personal health record space with Apple Health, a new feature that will interface with electronic health records at a dozen hospitals.
For the past two years, Apple has been making under-the-radar moves to bolster its healthcare efforts, starting with its 2016 acquisition of a personal health record start-up called Gliimpse Health.
Ten years ago, when Microsoft and Google were battling to make the personal health record idea resonate with consumers, much of the basic infrastructure needed to spur adoption did not exist. In 2007, less than a third of all doctors and other healthcare providers used an electronic medical record.
The passage of the HITECH Act, another key healthcare IT event, would take place two years later and would spur on widespread adoption of EMRs. Without the mandate and accompanying incentives to finally capture health data in digital form, developing personal health record systems would be a fruitless effort. On top of this, there were few interoperability standards, so even if you had health data, it was a huge challenge to share it with anyone else, including the patient.
Another important piece of technology that had only just hit the market a decade ago? It’s the iPhone. Apple released the first version of the iPhone in the summer of 2007, and today it has grown its user base to over 500 million people.
Most of us love our iPhone, as evidenced by the fact that we use our iPhone a LOT. A recent study shows the average U.S. consumer now spends 5 hours per day on their mobile device. With such incredible penetration into our daily lives, it should come as little surprise that the mobile phone you currently have in your hand is still the “most valuable piece of real estate in the entire world,” to borrow a phrase from Byron Deeter.
Some healthcare experts in my network have wondered why established medical record vendors, like Epic or Cerner, are better positioned to succeed. After all, these companies already have personal health portals built out and deployed. Vendors like Epic and Cerner put the healthcare provider first—and rightfully so as they are the ones who pay the bills—when designing these products. Apple, on the other hand, is incentivized to put the consumer first.
Apple’s skeptics have also pointed out to me that the company will run into an inevitable stumbling block: Getting consumers to engage in their health.
This this time may be different. Why? With the rise of high deductible health plans, consumers are bearing a much larger share of healthcare costs these days. Ten years ago, only 10% of consumers had a deductible of $1,000 or more. Today that number is hovering around 50% of all consumers.
As consumers reach into their wallets to pay for healthcare services, they will become much more active in decision-making. And what better place to start than to engage with personal health data.
The brilliance of Apple’s approach thus far is to open up their software and services to developers to build apps for consumers, and allow the consumer to push their data to these apps. The same paradigm will exist in healthcare, where consumers will push their personal health records to apps to open up a much more personalized and engaging product experience.
