Apple Health 12+

As others have said, I want to like this app. It has a lot of features that I’m looking for, but it has a number of problems that are very frustrating within the state of mind part of the health app. It allows you to make comments to present a context for your momentary feelings, but after those are written, there’s no way to access the full text or even your full list of emotions if you had more than five or six. Feeling a lot these days, lol. How helpful can that note be if you can’t review it at another time. Additionally, when using the speech to text feature to fill in your notes is difficult if you tend to pause while thinking because it will cut off and then when you try to click back into the field to continue writing it starts you in the middle of your sentence. I think of Apple products as being of top quality. These kinds of navigational issues feel silly to be found within an app produced by a company I expect to be better than average.

Please hire someone who is familiar with how to present data graphically in an appropriate way. Your graphs have no labels on the axis so it’s impossible to actually understand visually at a quick glance. And for the love of god use a simple line graph to represent continuous data over time. I really want to use and like the graphs but it’s so hard to understand when I went to sleep and woke up at a quick glance or understand my heart rate over time without clicking on every data point due to lack of labels. Additionally, let me customize which metrics I want to view on the main dashboard and the particular order. I already know when I’m going to get my period (a lot of women do! If you’d ask us and not assume, you’d know this!) so I don’t need that listed first (also at most it’s only relevant like a week of the month anyway)! I want my daily step count front and center, followed by sleep and heart rate. From each metric I’d like to click into the graphic representation over time, not scroll through a bunch of confusing graphs all on the main page. Take a hint from the Fitbit app! PLEASE improve this so I can justify buying an Apple Watch over my old beloved Fitbit that was sooo much better at displaying my health metrics.

Now that the VA has a new app, SMHD, to share health data. It has improved, but not perfected, sharing of personal health data among healthcare providers. There are still many providers, and multiple patient portal services, that do not easily interface with APPLE HEALTH. The app needs better report functions to permit downloading and printing data and summaries that can be shared with specialist providers. My cardiologist and my nephrologist are pleased to get what related data I can forward to them to help round out their picture of me. It gives them more confidence than a one-off snapshot of my vitals taken during an office appointment. It also allows telehealth consultations to have more basis for presumptive care decisions. With the increasing availability of home health monitoring technologies, tools, and associated apps, we have better data such as O2Sats, BP, AFIB, Blood Glucose; and therefore early warning of health issues. More effort needs to be put into collecting, correlating, and reporting pertinent data to our healthcare providers.