Apple loves to disrupt things. The iPod and iTunes disrupted the music industry. The iPhone disrupted the telecommunications industry. And so on.

Apple identifies inefficiencies in a market and rolls out a vastly improved model. Obviously, this strategy has paid off time and again.

HealthKit is just the beginning of what could be a major disruption. Jared Sinclair was a registered nurse, before switching gears and dedicating himself to iOS development. From his blog:

Until relatively recently, the vast majority of medical records in the US have been recorded on paper. From routine doctor visits to lengthy stays in critical care, every piece of data – lab results, medication orders, progress notes, etc. – were written or typed on paper and stored in massive warehouses. It wasn’t until the 1990s that electronic health records (EHRs) started to gain widespread traction. Doctors and hospitals were under no legal obligation to use EHRs, so the only providers to use them did so for organizational efficiency.

There are competing formats for electronic health records. Each format maintains its own silo, with no interoperability between competing formats.

It’s disappointing but unsurprising that EHR vendors would keep medical data trapped inside their silos. If medical data were distributed via a shared database, their products would be reduced to either dumb pipes or thin client apps. Being a dumb pipe is bad for business.

Is HealthKit the solution?

The first problem with HealthKit is that it can only model a tiny fraction of the spectrum of medical data. There is a very long list of things it can’t do: track medication doses, doctor’s orders, procedural notes, etc. But let’s assume for sake of argument that HealthKit eventually ships with model classes for every conceivable type of medical data. It still wouldn’t be able to bring about EHR interoperability.

I think the post is worth reading, though I think it is way too early to judge HealthKit as a medical solution and way too early to predict where Apple will be taking HealthKit. I think the future is wide open and I would definitely not bet against Apple disrupting the electronic medical records model.