At this stage of development, Discovery will only be available to the designers and developers of the app.
Discovery is an iPhone-only, patient-facing app developed at Harvard Medical School. The app is being used to evaluate how well the users can make sense of and utilize their electronic health record data if they are freely able to select and organize subsets of their data within Discovery.
Users download their electronic health record data to Discovery via their healthcare provider’s patient portals, which are limited to providers that use the Epic electronic health record system.
All electronic health record data downloaded by the user to Discovery is stored locally on that user’s iPhone and associated exclusively with Discovery. Any data that the user creates as a result of using Discovery to organize electronic health record data is also stored locally on their iPhone and associated exclusively with Discovery. No data is transmitted to Harvard Medical School servers or any third party servers.
Encrypted transmission of the electronic health record data from a healthcare provider to Discovery is done after access is granted through OAuth 2.0, a secure industry standard for accessing information on the Internet. This data and other data produced by Discovery is stored locally using iPhone’s app-level iOS system encryption.
The user may delete at any time and for any reason all data associated with Discovery from within the app or by deleting the app from the user’s iPhone.