Apple Is Quietly Working on Turning Your iPhone into the One-Stop Shop for All Your Medical Info

Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor's visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital websites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one. Apple is working on making that scenario a reality.

CNBC has learned that a secretive team within Apple's growing health unit has been in talks with developers, hospitals and other industry groups about bringing clinical data, such as detailed lab results and allergy lists, to the iPhone, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the team. And from there, users could choose to share it with third parties, like hospitals and health developers.

One of the people said Apple is looking at start-ups in the cloud hosting space about potential acquisitions that might fit into this plan. Essentially, Apple would be trying to re-create what it did with music — replacing CDs and scattered MP3s with a centralized management system in iTunes and the iPod — in the similarly fragmented and complicated landscape for health data...