How to Use Apple Health

When Apple launched iOS 8, its latest mobile operating system for iPhone and iPad, it included a new app called Health. Health helps you record a wide array of information about your health and wellness, giving you a single place to log health information and view how it changes over time. It also includes two special features that I think all iPhone owners should use.

The key to making the most of Apple's Health app is to keep track of a limited number of statistics about your health on the dashboard. The app contains so much information—it's huge! —that you'll want to be somewhat selective in choosing what to view on your main screen to be able to make sense of it. Yes, you might want to track everything, from how many steps you take in a day to your levels of magnesium every time you have blood work done, but the dashboard should have only the most important pieces of information to watch, and watch change over time. These might include weight, resting heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose level

Because it's a mobile app, it's a great tool to break out at your next doctor's visit so you can actually record all the numbers that your doc typically measures and rattles off at you before you've even had a chance to ask what they are and what they mean means.

Some of the information you store in Health can come automatically from other apps and devices, and some might require that you input it manually.

If you're worried about putting too much person information into the Health app, note that Apple does prohibits app from connecting with Health if they sell or share Health data to "advertising platforms, data brokers, or information resellers." The company also says that your information in Health is "encrypted with keys protected by your passcode, and never leaves your device unless you choose to back it up or grant access to a third-party app." That said, there is no additional passcode option for locking the app itself, which I like to see in any app with sensitive or personal information.

If you choose not to use the Health app, just note that you can't delete it. The Health app is installed on all devices running iOS 8. If you don't want to use it, just ignore it, move it out of sight into a folder, and do nothing—although I highly recommend using it, if only for the emergency contact information and medical ID. I explain below how to enable both of those, and once they're set up, you can go back to ignoring the app.

Set Up These Features First: Medical ID and Emergency Contact
Say you keel over in the street. Decent human beings will rush over to help, and they might check your handbag and pockets for identification. If they don't, any EMTs arriving on the scene definitely will.

The iPhone and iPad lock screen has long had an "emergency" button that lets anyone make a call from your phone using the dial keypad, but it never before contained anything more than that. Now, you can put your primary medical information there, as well as the name and phone number of your emergency contact.

Medical ID. Open the Health app, and you'll see Medical ID listed in the lower right corner. Tap Edit in the upper right corner and fill in as much or as little information as you choose. The data include Medical Conditions, Allergies and Reactions, Blood Type, and Organ Donor.

Emergency Contact. In the same location (Health app > Medical ID), you can add your emergency contact. That person must be listed in your iPhone or iPad's Contacts app and must have a phone number assigned for the choice to be valid. You won't be able to type in any old name and phone number. Fill it out, and that's it! It will now appear on your lock screen as an emergency call option.

Connect Apps for Automatic Importing
The next piece you'll probably want to set up is connected apps. The Health app can import data from other health and fitness apps that you use, such as Fitbit, Withings Health, MyFitnessPal, running and workout apps, heart rate and blood pressure apps, and more. Health will import historical data, too, which is key. When you populate the app with historical data, its value immediately becomes clearer, because it no longer looks like a blank slate.

How to connect apps. To connect an app to Health, you have to launch that app and look in its settings or profile area for an option to connect or "share" with Health. The location is different for each app. Toggle this setting on, and you might see additional options, depending on how much information this particular app stores. Be sure to read the options, because there might be two main areas: one for reading data and one for writing.

"Read" means this app will import the information you select from Health, and "write" means Health will import the data from the app. Depending on how much data the app collects, there could be dozens and dozens of choices here, so take your time.

It's not entirely clear to me how Health handles imported data from two or more sources with the same metric. For example, some workout apps record heart rate, but that's likely active heart rate. Other apps record resting heart rate, which will be significantly lower. My inclination is to use only resting heart rate in the Health app, and exclude active heart rate from apps that record it. But it's entirely up to you.

How to see that apps are connected. To verify that the app connected to Health, open the Health app and tap Sources at the bottom of the screen. You'll see a list of the connected apps. Tap any app, and you'll see a list of all the possible data points to import or export, with toggles so you can adjust them on the spot.

Log Blood Work Results (Cholesterol, Glucose, Vitamins and Nutrients)

If you have results from your latest blood work, you can log all kinds of information into the Health app. My biggest pieces of advice for doing this part is to use the search bar.

How to find fields. Tap the Health Data icon at the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, if you see an option to go back (in the upper left), go back until you're on the main Health Data page. At the top, you'll see a search bar. Use it! It's the easiest way to find the fields you want.

Beneath the search app are categories that you can explore, but they are very difficult to navigate. Rather than browse for information to record, I recommend working off any paperwork or device readouts you have and just using the search bar. Of course, there are some key data points many people will want to record...

Cholesterol. One piece of information many people want to track is cholesterol. It's in Health, but it's listed until 'D' for "dietary cholesterol." But if you key "cho" into the search field, it'll show up. In Health, you can only log total cholesterol. There isn't a breakdown for LDL versus HDL. I recommend logging only total cholesterol here because if you log only one of them, you may forget later what you decided to record. There isn't a field to even add a note to your information (which I discuss in more detail later).

Sodium. Sodium is another common point that many people want to track. You can find it with the search tool, or by going into the Nutrition area and scrolling down to 'S.'

Blood glucose. Diabetics will be happy to see a blood glucose field. It's listed in the Results area. As with other data, you can import your results from an app that supports Health, to make the tracking nearly effortless. Note, however, that Health doesn't give you the ability to differentiate between whether you're doing whole blood or plasma tests. As long as you're consistent about which result you record, it should be no problem. If the difference matters to you, you might want to keep your glucose readings in a more specialized app.

Vitamins and nutrients. You can log your levels of other vitamins and nutrients, too, just by searching for them. It's helpful if you have a sensitivity due to some medication you're taking, or because your doctor notes you have an elevated or depleted level. While the section for vitamins and nutrients is fairly comprehensive, there are other blood work analysis data points that Health lacks, which I note below.

Add Charts to Your Dashboard
As you connect to other apps and log data, you'll see an option to add different data points to your dashboard. The dashboard view lets you scroll through your most important charts and toggle easily between views that plot the data from a single day, week, month, and the current year.

Be careful not to add too many charts to your dashboard, as it can quicky become overwhelming . I recommend limiting yourself to no more than ten. A few suggestions are:

  • weight
  • heart rate
  • blood pressure
  • steps
  • sleep analysis
  • and key data points that are specific to any conditions you have
  • .

Beware: Where Health Falls Short
There are a few areas where Apple's Health app falls short.

No app passcode option. As I mentioned at the start, there is no additional passcode option for locking the app itself, something I like to see in any app with sensitive or personal information.

Feedback and deeper information. When I plot a point, I want some kind of feedback about what that point means. It's frustrating that there is no indication in the Health app of what numbers are "good" or optimal for your age range and sex. I know that's not feasible with every reading, but I'd at least like to see a range of "good" data points for, say, blood pressure and resting heart rate.

What you can see is how your own data points shift over time. But that's only relative to your own information. I know Apple has to be careful not to give any medical advice or diagnoses in the Health app, for legal reasons, but there has to be something more to draw your attention to areas where you need to focus on your health.

Here's an idea: Let users adjust the color of the charts on their dashboards, or set their own color-coded levels within a graph. For example, if your doctor advises you to get your weight below, say, 165 pounds, you might put the weight module onto your dashboard and set a range of 140 to 165 pounds as green. Measurements higher than 165 might be in orange. You, with the help of your doctor, or even just your own information, could set those ranges.

Hormones, proteins, and other blood analysis. I just had blood work done, and I've been transferring all the results into the Health app. When I arrived at my readouts for cortisol, testosterone, and some related hormones and hormone carriers, I noticed there was no place to log them in Apple's Health app.

Neither could I find a place to put hemoglobin, albumin, creatine kinase, triglycerides, white blood cells, and several other readings that were in my blood work report.

So if you are tracking hormone levels, you should stick to another platform. For what it's worth, I didn't see any place to add hormone readings into Microsoft HealthVault either.

Pain, mood. Other data you won't be able to log are pain and mood. I recently heard from a reader who was concerned with logging pain day by day, and many health and fitness apps don't support it with a field. Several apps do, however, have a journal area, free-form notes field, or mood logging aspect, which you could certainly use to record your daily pain levels. Health doesn't have anything that could substitute for pain or mood logging.

Units of measure. I'm not the most savvy person when it comes to understanding medical data, and I reckon most people are in the same boat. So when I look at a chart from my doctor and I see units of data that don't match exactly what's in the Health app, I wonder if I'm recording the right thing, or if I'm supposed to move a decimal point. For example, in one of my medical results, there's a number shown in mg/dL, and the correlating entry in Health just offers grams, with no ability to change the value. Rather than look up the fact that "grams" in this case typically means "grams per liter," and then converting the value, I'd rather just change the Health unit to match what's in my charts. Currently, you can't.

Keep an Eye on Your Health What I like most about the Health app is that it's putting the idea of mobile health-tracking in front of millions of people. It may not be the easiest app to use, nor the most nuanced, but it's something. And when it comes to being fit, eating right, and monitoring your health, something is better than nothing.



About Jill Duffy