HL7® FHIR® R4
The international standard for exchanging health data. Every result is stored as a resource conforming to the FHIR format.
hl7.org/fhir →how & why
I like Apple Health — everything in one place.
If you live in the US, or partly in the UK, there's a good chance your lab results land in Apple Health by themselves, from a connected network of clinics (Epic, Cerner and the like). The rest of the world watches through the glass. In Poland, where this project started, there's a state patient portal, and labs like Diagnostyka and ALAB each ship their own app. Every one of them different, and none of them talks to Apple Health. Officially, none of them even can.
Where this came from
I like having data in one place (within reason, of course — where it's safe). Fitness, sleep, heart rate, medications — all of it already lives in Health, on your own phone, behind your own biometric lock. Apple's privacy model and security are its strongest suit: the data is yours, encrypted end-to-end. No app gets to it without your consent. There are no extra subscriptions and no cloud accounts either — everything is on your iPhone, and only you decide what to do with it.
So what if lab results could land in Apple Health too, if you just tried adding them by hand…?
What LabCard is built on
No proprietary format — underneath there are three open standards that Apple Health already speaks every day.
SMART Health Cards 1.4.0
The wrapper and the signature. The FHIR bundle is compressed and signed
cryptographically (JWS ES256) — Apple Health recognises this
format natively.
LOINC® + UCUM
Universal naming, codes for tests and for units. They are the reason “glucose” from one lab and from another, imported through LabCard, land in the same bucket in Apple Health.
What's next
It would be great to reach a point where labs, everywhere, ship results that import into Apple Health on their own. That option doesn't exist today, so LabCard is, in a sense, a workaround. Sooner or later state health portals may take over the role of a convenient results repository — public digitisation of medical data is moving along at a decent pace.
LabCard is experimental for now and there's no guarantee it will keep working in the future. It has no support from, and no affiliation with, Apple Inc. or any laboratory. Apple can change the way Health accepts verifiable health records at any moment, and LabCard will stop working. But for now it works, and it's quite convenient.
If the project turns out useful to anyone else, great. Maybe in the future I'll add more kinds of results, or other record types Apple Health supports. It stays a hobby project, non-commercial.
Get yourselves tested ;-)