Apple HealthKit champion Ricky Bloomfield, MD, said that Apple is adding support for the Health Level 7 Continuity of Care Document to iOS 10.

Bloomfield, who made the remarks here at the MobiHealthNews 2016 event, also attended Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference earlier in the day, where Apple revealed that iOS 10 will be available this fall and showcased a range of new features from improved messaging to a new Home app and HomeKit and updates to maps, photos and Siri.

While Apple did not announce the CCD support on stage, Bloomfield, who is the director of technology strategy at Duke Medicine and a noted HealthKit proponent, said Apple officials told him personally it was coming.

“The goal is to empower patients to control their own data,” Bloomfield said. “It will enable any app to create and share a CCD with HealthKit, and another app can read that by using HealthKit.”

So a doctor can create a CCD, let her patients have that, and patients, in turn, can share that document with other caregivers and clinicians.

Bloomfield added that giving patients this much control also helps change the tradition of paternalism in healthcare.

“This is really an exciting time for patient empowerment in in the patient-generated health data movement,” Bloomfield said. “It will be exciting to see where this goes.”

Apple did not return an inquiry about CCD by press time.