Survey Finds 78% of Patients Satisfied With Apple Health Records at UC San Diego Hospital

UC San Diego Health recently sent an online survey to its first 425 patients who activated Apple Health Records in 2018, and among 132 respondents, 78 percent indicated that they were "satisfied with using the feature."

health records ios 11
96 percent of respondents said they could "easily connect their mobile devices to the platform," and 90 percent said the "smartphone solution improved their understanding of their own health, facilitated conversations with their clinicians, or improved sharing of personal health information with friends and family."

The survey results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week by doctors at UC San Diego Health, one of the first hospitals and clinics to make Apple Health Records available to its patients.

Apple introduced the Health Records feature in iOS 11.3 in March 2018, allowing patients to view their medical records from multiple participating hospitals and clinics directly in the Health app on the iPhone, including allergies, vital signs, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, and procedures.

The journal submission cautions that, as with many new products and solutions, such enthusiasm is common from early adopters. The platform will need to "prove that it is useful, sustainable, scalable, and actually improves health outcomes," according to Christian Dameff, MD, UC San Diego Health.

As noted by CNBC's Christina Farr, hospitals have historically faced "major challenges" with getting patients to use electronic medical records because the technology "tends to be poorly designed and hard to use."

UC San Diego Health doctors believe three key developments may contribute to the success of Apple Health Records compared to earlier efforts like Google Health in 2008, including the ubiquity of mobile technology, the maturation of health data communications standards, and the widespread use of App Stores.

More than 100 institutions now support Apple Health Records in the United States, including Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and Apple reportedly hopes to add the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a partner as well, a move that would provide veterans with access to the feature.

Health records are stored in the Health Data tab of the Health app on iOS 11.3 and later.

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Top Rated Comments

jimthing Avatar
81 months ago
Get back to us when public institutions like the NHS here in the UK support it, where virtually every citizen has a record (all 65m of us).
Then it'll be worth patting themselves on the back. Not this.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
koruki Avatar
81 months ago
lol wow look at all the whining comments already, they need to make a start somewhere guys. Rome wasn't built in a day
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
OverSpun Avatar
81 months ago
I only recently activated this feature but I think it works great. It is a lot more convenient than flipping through prints of medical labs.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
PsykX Avatar
81 months ago
Below 90-95% of satisfaction will make it really hard to adopt in public hospitals IMO.
But we really, like really really have to use these technologies sooner than later, or the system will continue to crumble (in Quebec at least)
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
citysnaps Avatar
81 months ago
Get back to us when public institutions like the NHS here in the UK support it, where virtually every citizen has a record (all 65m of us).
Then it'll be worth patting themselves on the back. Not this.
I think I missed who patted themselves on the back.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
coolbreeze Avatar
81 months ago
Yeah we’re gonna need a web portal for our Apple Health data. The Garmin portal is amazing.

I know Apple, Google, etc love locking people into upgrade (profit) treadmills, but platform lock shouldn’t be a thing for healthcare data.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)