HealthKit provides a way for iOS devices to integrate health-related device data for use by the iOS device owner, no more, no less.
This author is pointing the myriad of actual reasons why "your personal medical data" is stunningly uninteresting to healthcare providers and not at all a simple problem to solve.
The reality is that HealthKit is going to be a victim of Apple's inability to play nicely with others, in addition to its other technical limitations also described in the post. However, Apple has positioned it so that when it does flop, they can play off as the big bad medical industry refusing to embrace change.
EDIT: This is not snark. It's an observation. Recall last time with iTunes Steve Jobs managed to get all the music industry players on board even though the deal wasn't in their favor. I doubt Apple will be able to achieve the same in the health industry without Steve Jobs at the helm.
I don't know if there could be a progressive expansion of capability and then an attack on the EHR market but Apple hasn't signalled that and it isn't currently intended for that.
There be bureaucratic dragons.
Agreed with the other commenters here, although I do appreciate the original blog post for pointing out concrete examples of backwards technology use in health care. It is a good reminder that pretty much every industry (perhaps outside of tech companies with tech customers interoperating with each other) has major dysfunction and underutilization of current technologies.
Perhaps he didn't state this so explicitly, but the subtext in his post is that that he believes HealthKit not going to have an impact on care delivery without EHR integration.
He did mention this, albeit towards the end:
> In practice, I expect HealthKit will have little or no impact on professional healthcare delivery.
There are a lot of interesting things that can be done in the world of health-tech that don't qualify as "healthcare delivery". On the other hand, most of the parts that people talk about "disrupting" do. Care delivery tends to be the most expensive (though also the highest yield, dollar-for-dollar) component of health.
You remember the scenario the author sketches out - a critical care patient arrives and you're handed a packet and given a verbal description. Now someone is saying some more crucial information is just lurking on the patient's iPhone? Yeah, either you waste crucial minutes finding that or that info is lost (most likely). Thanks Apple.