[hitgeek]

Microsoft and Google both failed with forays into medical records, so I'm skeptical apple will see much success.

Most people do not want to manage their own health records, or only become interested for short periods of time after illness.

For those who do want this service, I'm hopeful Apple will improve user experience such that its easy but provides value.

EHR vendors do not make data sharing easy so having an even larger player in the space, pushing innovation, is welcomed.

[robbiemitchell]

> Most people do not want to manage their own health records

How do you know? This isn't a capability right now. I suspect that once people have their record and can plug it in wherever they want, they'll like having it.

[hitgeek]

I was previously the administrator of a "patient portal" that was connected to our health record system.

we had a hard time getting people interested in using it and signing up. and those who did sign up rarely used it after the first few weeks.

when talking to people, the primary reason seemed to be that they wanted to communicate with a person for most healthcare related needs b/c they had questions or wanted clarification/re-enforcement. They used the online portal so infrequently that they never felt confident they could quickly get what they needed accomplished.

The notable exception is parents managing the records of their children, which I don't think will be a feature of this v1 health records app.

its all about user experience though. i'm hopeful Apple can delivery something that is better than what is available and has come before.

i'm worried b/c I don't see it as a v1 and done feature. It will take consistent interaction and improvement as health record systems change and capabilities increase. hopefully apple is committed to it.

[prepend]

This is a lot cheaper for Apple since there’s no site and database to maintain.

And this is a bit of a differentiator since Google is not interested in having encrypted user data they can’t analyze.

[r00fus]

Bingo. It's all about incentives. Google's customers are the advertisers. Microsoft's customers are largely OEMs and Corporations.

Apple's are consumers for the main part. Consumers benefit could from this feature, and they will buy more product (or stay more loyal).