Iatric Systems, Inc., a comprehensive healthcare IT integration company, has undertaken the enterprise-wide integration of Apple Health with an EHR-neutral approach that pulls and presents patient data from a variety of hospital inpatient, ambulatory and even patient-provided data sources.

The first two hospitals to engage Iatric Systems for enterprise-class integration of the Apple Health app are Memorial Healthcare, a 150-bed facility in Owosso, Michigan; and King's Daughters Medical Center, a 122-bed hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

Driven by Meaningful Use requirements and a genuine desire to more deeply involve patients in their own care, hospitals are expanding their patient engagement strategies to include tools like Apple Health to create a more patient-centric and patient-involved environment. This approach supports people staying healthier and having better outcomes when they do become ill.

"We envision our patients using Apple Health easily because for many, the iPhone is already a main part of their lives. We needed to make the self-empowerment tool easy for our patients to access, and that's where Iatric Systems, their integration skills and patient portal came into play," said Frank Fear, Vice President of Ancillary Services/CIO at Memorial Healthcare. "We could have integrated Apple Health within a portal from our EHR vendor or ambulatory system vendor, but data from disparate systems sits in silos. Iatric Systems was a natural fit because their portal integrates across all of our systems, giving us one tool for capturing and sending data to patients, and eventually, receiving data back from them."

As a vendor-agnostic integration company, Iatric Systems brings providers the benefits of virtually any application and solution, such as Apple Health, to help advance their patient engagement capabilities. Iatric Systems can link data from EHRs, physician practices and standalone departmental solutions, and present that data in one view for providers and patients alike.

"People have been talking about patient-centered healthcare for a while, and patient engagement as we know it today is a first step, but it's not the end-game. Hospitals must deliver the tools patients need to truly become active in their own healthcare; that means bringing together patient data from all sources and presenting it to patients in a simple, clear and actionable way," said Frank Fortner, President of Iatric Systems. "Integrating Apple Health across hospital enterprises begins to lay the groundwork for where the healthcare industry needs to head, which is creating real patient empowerment at the intersection of active patient engagement and the Quantified-Self, or self-tracking, movement where personal fitness devices and software applications are already making a difference."

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