Apple Health Clinical Records Import on iPhone

What "Apple Health Clinical Records" actually means

Inside the iPhone Health app, two very different kinds of data live side by side. The first is everyday HealthKit data: steps, heart rate, ECG from an Apple Watch, sleep stages, workout summaries, weight from a connected scale, and so on. The second is Apple Health Records — a separate category that holds clinical information published into your phone by a US health system you have connected. Records here arrive as structured FHIR resources, with lab results identified by LOINC codes.

Health3 reads only the second category, and within that category only lab results — the FHIR resources that map to HKClinicalType.labResultsRecord on iOS. The app uses a native Swift bridge (a MethodChannel named com.health3.app/clinical_records) to ask HealthKit for the lab records you have authorized, then maps each LOINC code to a Health3 biomarker — so a result tagged with the LOINC for ferritin shows up as ferritin with the correct unit and reference range.

Apple Health Clinical Records is the separate FHIR/LOINC lab feed. Health3 reads the clinical records side only — not general HealthKit.

How to enable it on your iPhone

There are two phases. First, connect your US hospital or clinic to Apple Health. Second, give Health3 permission to read those records.

1. Open the Health app on your iPhone.
2. Tap the Browse tab, scroll down, and choose Add Account under Health Records.
3. Search for your hospital, clinic, or health system. Apple participates with major US EHRs including Epic and Cerner, so many large US health systems are listed.
4. Sign in with the same credentials you use for your provider's MyChart, FollowMyHealth, or equivalent portal.
5. Once connected, lab results, medications, and other records appear under Health Records in the Health app.
6. Open Health3, go to settings, choose to import from Apple Health Clinical Records, and approve the read permission Apple shows you.

Health3 will then import existing lab values and any new results that arrive after the next visit. If you also use Labcorp or Quest directly, you can supplement the Apple Health Records import with our standard lab PDF import.

What Health3 reads from Apple Health

To repeat the scope clearly: Health3 reads Apple Health Clinical Records — clinical lab records only — not general HealthKit vitals. In practice that means:

• What is read: FHIR lab observations from a connected US health system, identified by LOINC code and mapped to Health3's internal biomarker library. Common chemistry, hematology, lipid, thyroid, iron, vitamin, and metabolic markers are matched automatically.
• What is not read: steps, distance, flights climbed, heart rate, resting heart rate, ECG, blood oxygen, sleep stages, HRV, body weight, body fat percentage, calories burned, active minutes, or any other HealthKit metric written by an Apple Watch, iPhone, or third-party fitness app.

Health3 supports 180 biomarkers in total. Whether a specific marker appears in your timeline depends on whether your health system publishes it into Apple Health Records and whether its LOINC code matches a marker in our mapping table. Unrecognized records are simply not charted.

Why we don't read steps, sleep, or heart rate

Apple Health is two products in one: a personal-fitness layer (HealthKit) and a clinical-records layer (Health Records via FHIR/LOINC). Health3 is a lab-tracking and biomarker app — built around blood, urine, and other clinical lab values, not the data your watch generates.

Steps, sleep stages, and resting heart rate are already well-served by Apple's Fitness app and dedicated wearable platforms. Pretending to integrate them would duplicate that work poorly. Instead, Health3 specializes: it reads clinical records only, not general HealthKit, maps each lab result to a biomarker, and shows you the biomarker trends over time alongside reference range overlays and PDF export for clinicians.

Privacy and data flow

Health3 imports clinical records from Apple Health on-device and stores them inside the Health3 app and your account. The connection is read-only: the app's Info.plist explicitly does not request HealthKit write permission, and Health3 never pushes data back into Apple Health. The Health app remains the source-of-truth copy of records published by your health system.

Health3 is GDPR-compliant. We are not a HIPAA-covered entity and the app is not marketed as a HIPAA-compliant clinical system; the relationship between you, your hospital, and Apple Health is governed by their respective agreements and US regulations. You can revoke Apple Health permission at any time from the iPhone Settings app under Health, which immediately stops further imports.

When this feature won't work for you

This is an honest list of cases where Apple Health Clinical Records import is not the right path:

• You are not in the US. Apple Health Records is, in practice, a US-centric program built around US EHRs. Outside the US, your hospital is unlikely to publish records into Apple Health, and the connection screen will be empty for your country.
• Your hospital or clinic does not participate. Even within the US, not every health system has chosen to expose records through Apple. If your provider does not appear in the Add Account list, no records will flow.
• Your provider participates but does not push the lab you care about. Some health systems publish a subset of their data. If a particular biomarker is missing from your Apple Health Records, Health3 cannot read what is not there.
• You are on Android. Apple Health is iPhone-only, so this specific path simply does not exist on Android. Use lab PDF import instead.
• You want to track Apple Watch data. Health3 does not read Apple Watch metrics or any other HealthKit fitness data. Clinical records only — not general HealthKit. If wearables are your priority, see our use case for Apple Watch users for how the two worlds can complement each other.

If any of these apply, lab PDF import is the cleanest fallback. It works on iPhone and Android, in any country. See also our guide for tracking results across multiple doctors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Import Apple Health Clinical Records into Health3

If your US health system publishes lab results into Apple Health, Health3 can read them on your iPhone in minutes — and chart each marker over time.