Another day and another tech firm announces they're set to revolutionise healthcare with their dinky new app, promising to bring untold insights from your personal health records to the palm of your hand and enable information sharing on an unimaginable scale. We hear this boast often enough and cast a thoroughly sceptical eye over every one, but when the app comes from Apple, we do admit to taking a little more notice than usual.

Gossip has abounded about Apple's interest in entering the personal health record market for some years and they've already got some runs on the board with their ResearchKit and HealthKit technology and the existing Health app. But while they've been hiring quite a few people with health technology experience over the last few years, speculation about Apple's likelihood of success in PHRs has always been tempered by the example of Google, which tried and failed with Google Health, and Microsoft, which still markets its HealthVault solution but which just this month closed down HealthVault Insights, an app that used machine learning to analyse health data.