Apple Health import

The data is already on the phone — and trapped there

If your parent has an iPhone (and most do), the Health app has been quietly collecting data for years: resting heart rate, walking steadiness, weight, blood pressure if they use a connected cuff, sleep, steps. Almost none of it makes it to the workspace, the doctor, or anyone outside the phone. The data is rich, the export is awkward, and most families never realize what they’re sitting on.

One-time import, no EHR partnership required

On your parent’s iPhone: Health app → profile picture → Export All Health Data → AirDrop or email the zip to yourself. Upload it to Kintaria. We unpack the XML, pull the metrics that matter for caregiving (heart rate, blood pressure, weight, walking steadiness, sleep), and plot them on the medical-history timeline. No Epic partnership, no MyChart account-linking, no doctor’s office involvement — just an export the iPhone already knows how to make.

Catching the steadiness decline

You import Mom’s health export after her fall. Walking steadiness — a metric the iPhone derives from accelerometer data — has been quietly trending downward for four months. PCP didn’t know because Mom never mentioned it; Mom didn’t mention it because it crept up slowly. With the chart, the PT referral becomes obvious and Medicare-covered.

The longer version

The problem you didn’t realize you had

If your parent has visited a major U.S. hospital system in the last decade, there’s a good chance her medical records are already on her iPhone — sitting in the Health app, synced from MyChart, Cerner, or whichever portal the hospital uses. Every lab result. Every immunization. Every prescription she’s ever filled at a connected pharmacy.

And it’s effectively trapped there. Mom doesn’t know how to export it. The daughter doesn’t know it exists. The doctor at the new specialist asks for the labs from the cardiology workup two years ago, and the only available answer is “let me see if I can find that — we changed cardiologists since then.”

Meanwhile, the actual data — every CBC, every A1C, every flu shot — has been quietly accumulating in a phone in her purse the entire time.

What Kintaria does

Apple gave consumers a clean, well-engineered FHIR-compliant export of their entire health record in 2019. Kintaria uses it.

Mom (or someone helping her) opens the Health app on her iPhone → tap her profile picture → Export All Health Data. The phone produces a ZIP file. Email it to yourself, AirDrop it, save it to iCloud. Then in Kintaria, click Import from Apple Health, drop the ZIP in.

Kintaria parses the FHIR records and pulls in:

• Lab results — every value, with units, dates, reference ranges, and the lab that ran it. Trended automatically.
• Immunizations — flu shots, COVID boosters, shingles vaccine, pneumonia, tetanus. Often years back.
• Medications — prescriptions filled at any connected pharmacy, including dosage and date.
• Procedures — biopsies, scans, surgeries — with dates and CPT codes when available.
• Vital signs — blood pressure, weight, glucose readings she’s been logging or having her blood pressure cuff sync.

You see a preview before anything lands in the workspace. Nothing gets imported without your review. You can deselect a hospital you don’t want to include, or trim the date range.

Why this works (when manual entry doesn’t)

Most caregivers, asked to enter their parent’s medical history into a new app, do roughly nothing. The data set is too big and they’re not sure what matters. Apple Health import inverts the problem: you start with everything, then trim down.

It also captures the things you don’t know to ask. The flu shot Mom got at the pharmacy three years ago isn’t something the daughter would have manually recorded. The eGFR trend that’s been creeping down for eighteen months isn’t something anyone watches unless they have the values plotted next to each other. Kintaria’s lab-trend view fills in the line.

The honest caveat

Apple Health is only as good as what’s connected to it. If Mom has never connected her hospital’s patient portal to her iPhone, there’s nothing to export. The setup is real but it’s a one-time, 5-minute task — in Health.app → Browse → Health Records → Add Account → search for her hospital.

About 80% of large U.S. hospital systems are now connected (Epic, Cerner, and Meditech sites). Smaller community hospitals and standalone specialists are spottier. Anything missing from Apple Health is missing from the Kintaria import.

We don’t do MyChart-direct integration. Apple does it better — they’ve negotiated the data sharing agreements, they handle consent, they keep up with new hospitals. We just consume what they’ve built.

Why this matters

Caregiving is largely the work of becoming the second copy of your parent’s medical record. Every appointment, every form, every new specialist asks you to recite. Mom’s memory of her own history is fading or compressed; you become the warehouse.

Apple Health import shortcuts that. The first time you set up a Kintaria workspace, you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from everything, and trimming down. The first new specialist who asks for the lab work you no longer have to say “let me see if I can find that.” You hand them a complete trend chart from your phone.

Caregiving is largely the work of becoming the second copy of your parent’s medical record. Apple Health import shortcuts that.