The Wall Street Journal reports Apple is in talks with the Department of Veterans Affairs about a partnership in which the two would work to offer veterans access to their medical records via the iPhone.
Citing people familiar with the matter and emails pertaining to the proposed initiative, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reports the program aims to enable health record portability for some nine million veterans enrolled in VA systems. The partnership would grant Apple access to a massive, condensed segment of the hard-to-crack U.S. healthcare market.
Apple would create a special software tool that would assist in the transfer of health records from the VA to the iPhone. The Cupertino firm would also be tasked with providing engineering support to the agency.
The WSJ report says VA officials began discussing with members of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club a program to modernize VA records management last year. Email correspondence suggest the Trump administration “wrestled early on with the project’s goals.”
Although the report doesn’t specify it, Apple would likely be looking for ways to integrate the veterans’ health info into their Health Records tool.
Health Records debuted alongside iOS 11.3 last March, and aggregates and stores encrypted patient data in the iOS Health app, providing portable and immediately accessible health information to users, allowing them to quickly share health information with doctors and other caregivers.
