Finally!!! Apple has entered the EHR field

Apple has entered the EHR field.  This is very good news for patients.  Zdnet has a very interesting article forecasting that Apple will have success.  Here are the seven reasons why:

• "The Apple Watch and iPhone is a conduit for micro-level data such as heart rate, activity and if in some cases medical conditions. Apple's HealthKit already gives the company a foothold in the healthcare market.

• Apple is good with partnering. Just like Apple has with enterprise technology giants, the company has partnered with the leading players in the health record space. Apple is going for the aggregation approach and partnering to suck in data from participating medical institutions in one place.
• The leading medical data players are on board with Health Records. Apple is starting with a dozen hospitals including Johns Hopkins Medicine and Penn Medicine and has connections into Epic Systems and Cerner. Epic and Cerner are the leading players in the medical record management space. Think of Epic as the SAP of hospital management software. The hospitals listed as Apple's launch partners run on Epic and Cerner for the most part.
• Apple is going along with standards. Health Records is based on FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is a standard for transferring electronic medical records.
• The healthcare industry has already done a lot of the heavy lifting. The real work to move to electronic medical records has occurred over the last decade with a push from the government. All that IT integration primed the pump for a player like Apple to bring healthcare data to consumer devices.
• Apple's enterprise footprint can be leveraged. When Apple is pitching its health record and portal wares it appeals to IT executives directly.
• Privacy. Apple has played the privacy marketing well and differentiated itself from Google's cloud and data centric approach. In areas like artificial intelligence, Apple's approach is a handicap. In healthcare, that approach is an asset as Health Records will be encrypted and protected under a user's iPhone passcode."