Key Takeaways Android 16 will introduce a major update to Health Connect, enabling it to support medical records in FHIR format, starting with immunization records.
This update allows health and fitness apps to read and write medical data through new APIs, requiring explicit user consent.
Google’s Health Connect aims to standardize and streamline the sharing of health and fitness data between different apps and healthcare systems. ✕ Remove Ads
Google announced the first developer preview of Android 16 today, giving us an early look at some of the new features coming in next year’s big update. While the first developer preview doesn’t have a lot of changes, it does confirm that Android 16 will include a big update to the Health Connect service that brings support for medical records.
Related What is Health Connect and how do I use it? What you need to know about the local Android service that connects all your fitness apps
Health Connect is a service that makes it easier for your favorite health and fitness apps on Android to share data with one another. It basically provides a single, shared “language” that health and fitness apps can communicate over.
For example, say you install a fitness tracking app to track your heart rate data while running, but then later you want to migrate to a different app. The first app you installed might store your heart rate data in a way that the second app can’t handle without converting it. It wouldn’t be too complicated for developers to handle these conversions if there were only one or two health and fitness apps out there, but there are dozens they need to handle.
This is a challenge that Health Connect gracefully solves by providing a single set of APIs to read and write health and fitness data that developers need to handle. The first fitness tracking app in the example above can write the heart rate data it collected on you to Health Connect, which stores that data in a local database, so that the second app can later read that same data. This isn’t a one-time thing, either, as apps can use the new background and historical reading features of Health Connect to access your entire health and fitness data and keep that data continuously updated.
Health Connect’s power is all in its APIs
However, one limitation of Health Connect is that apps can only access or store data that the service actually provides APIs for. Health Connect supports many different data types that are broadly categorized under the six categories of Activity, Body Measurement, Cycle Tracking, Nutrition, Sleep, and Vitals. Medical records aren’t currently supported by Health Connect, but that’s changing in Android 16.
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Apps like Fitbit can currently read and write your health and fitness data, but not your medical records, to Health Connect.
Starting in Android 16 Developer Preview 1, Health Connect lets apps read and write your medical data through a new set of APIs. The first developer preview includes an early version of these APIs that lets apps write your medical records in FHIR format. FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and it basically accomplishes what Health Connect does but for electronic health records. By that I mean it standardizes the way electronic health records are saved and accessed, so different healthcare systems can easily export and import your health records. Google says these new Health Connect APIs are currently in early access and require “explicit user consent” to use, but they didn’t offer many more details.
Fortunately, the Health Connect app is open source, so we managed to find a few more details about this new feature. For starters, we’ve learned that Health Connect will first support immunization records ( MEDICAL_RESOURCE_TYPE_IMMUNIZATION ), but that Google will expand support to include lab results, medications, and more in the future. To read and write immunization data to Health Connect, apps will need to request the new android.permission.health.READ_MEDICAL_DATA_IMMUNIZATION and android.permission.health.WRITE_MEDICAL_DATA permissions respectively. The latter permission isn’t specific to writing immunization data, though, as it grants access to Health Connect’s new createMedicalDataSource API.
Meanwhile, the Health Connect app in Android 16 will add a new “browse health records” button, which will be located on the main screen of the app underneath the “manage data” section. We don’t have a screenshot of this section yet, but we did manage to get a screenshot of Google’s updated Health Connect Toolbox app, which Google is using to test this new feature.
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Google hasn’t said whether it’ll bring medical record support to Health Connect on Android 15 and below, but we’d be surprised if the company limited this feature to Android 16. After all, Health Connect has been available from the beginning as a standalone app and even Android’s built-in version can be updated independently of the OS since it’s a Project Mainline module.
Health Connect is adding support for medical records in Android 16
