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Apple and a ‘tiny start-up’ called Health Gorilla are reportedly working together to track and store all your medical information.
If you own an iPhone or any other Apple product, chances are good that said phone is home to a lot of your personal data. From log-ins and passwords to credit card numbers and identifying information, it’s just so much easier to save that information and accept (or delay!) the consequences.
Apple has already established a source to track your health information — peep the data in the Health app if you haven’t already — but they appear to be “working on a secret plan” to step their game up and store all your medical information too.
The tech company, according to CNBC, is working with Health Gorilla, “a tiny start-up.” The goal is to “add diagnostic data to the iPhone, including blood work, by integration with hospitals, lab-testing … and imaging centers.”
CNBC reports the main function of Health Gorilla as such:
It is primarily geared to physicians and serves as a marketplace for them to place orders and share medical records. But it also has a free offering for patients, which promises to gather up medical information in 10 minutes.
In theory, this will give hospitals and medical professionals access to vital data immediately — “at the point of care” as they say — rather than wasting time tracking down results and recommendations from different sources. In theory, Apple is “making the patient the center of their own care,” to the extent that:
The goal is to give iPhone users the tools to review, store and share their own medical information, including lab results, allergy lists and so on.
Again, in theory, this is all well and good. In practice, it’s going to be a HIPAA minefield. After all, who actually has access to the data on your phone is a perpetual matter of concern and it does not take a stretch of the imagination to envision the different ways Apple and the market’s boundless thirst for consumer data will attempt to leverage this influx of information.
Sure, you get to have all your medical information in one convenient place, centered in your pocket. But unfortunately in this era of technological convenience, you have to ask yourself who else gets to have it too.
