San Francisco-based Dignity Health has worked in sync with the Apple even before it beta-tested its Health Records project. Now iPhone Developer has 39 hospitals on board and Dignity Health continues to work with it as its longtime collaborator. The reason behind all this remains to be the change in the philosophy of the San Francisco-based company to empowering patients by giving them easy access to their own medical data.
Dignity Health Digital Transformation Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer MD Shez Partovi said, “We had been working with Apple prior to their initial announcement for some time. We’d been working with them for a while because we’re aligned in our philosophies of empowering patients by giving them their data.”
Partovi thinks that Apple will be a key player in future’s Health IT industry and offer quality care.
“When you think of personalized medicine, you can think about caring for yourself in two dimensions,” said Partovi. “There’s care management, where a health system or physician or team is managing your care, and there’s self-management.”
He also said that people having chronic conditions should really be careful with their health and take self-management seriously. For those patients managing an illness or a chronic condition, “a big part of your life is self-managing that condition,” he said.
He thinks that the technological advancements in healthcare will really augment self-management in the future and sees Apple’s Health records as a key player in the reshaping of future’s patient engagement. The reason he gives for his views is fact that Apple’s Health Records places valuable EHR data right onto a person’s cellphone. He sees the very provision of health records on smartphones a great stride in the field of self-management.
Partovi said that this has always been the philosophy of their company, adding, “We recognize that a lot of care happens outside the four walls of a health system. And we believe that for healthy populations we need to give patients their data.”
If the views of Partovi are correct, the hospitals who have currently signed up with Apple are moving in the right direction. All that remains to be seen is which other hospitals are going to jump on this bandwagon and help in reshaping the future of patient engagement.
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