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Apple's most important health news on Monday had nothing to with the major tech company getting into the world of fitness tracking.
It had everything to do with a much-less noticed part of the announcement: Apple will partner with Epic Systems, the country's largest electronic health records company, a deal that has the potential to revolutionize how patients access their medical history.
An estimated 40 percent of Americans already have medical information digitally stored on an Epic Systems health record. And Apple's new HealthKit will integrate with those millions of patient records, the company announced Monday.
This kind of partnership is something that no other fitness apps have — it's what could set HealthKit's other fitness tracking features apart from predecessors like the FitBit or Jawbone apps.
Here's how HealthKit could be different: by looping patients in with their providers through electronic health records, the app could hypothetically target people whose health is actually a problem, which is where real opportunity for improvement exists.
For example, active tracking of blood pressure in people with cardiovascular disease or better glucose monitoring in diabetics could allow doctors to intervene before patients have a medical episode.
But there's a flip side: experts are already concerned by how much of the EHR market Epic controls. If Apple decides to make its partnership with the company exclusive, health care providers could feel pressure from patients to adopt medical records that are iPhone-compatible.
"As a country we get nervous when any company in any sector has a market share in the range of 40 percent because we know that companies will use their market dominance to limit consumer options and hold back technological advancement," Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wrote last year.
Other critiques leveled at Epic — critiques about how their systems are designed — might not sound entirely new to Apple. "It does seem fitting that the computer company known for its functional but closed ecosystem chooses to partner with the EHR company best known for the same distinguishing characteristics," said David Shaywitz, senior director of strategic and commercial planning at Theravance.
While scaling up HealthKit with Apple is inarguably innovative, it's the kind of innovation that could lock in Epic's dominance in the EHR world, for better or worse.
