How to export Apple Health data

Open the Health app on the iPhone. Tap your profile picture or initials in the top right corner. Scroll to the very bottom of that screen, past the details and the units and the app list. The last item is "Export All Health Data."

Tap it, confirm, and wait. The phone assembles the archive, and how long that takes depends on how much history is in there. A phone with a few years of Apple Watch data can take several minutes and occasionally longer. Leave the screen open and the phone unlocked while it works; backgrounding the app has been known to interrupt it.

When it finishes, the standard share sheet appears. Choose where the file goes. Saving to Files, then to iCloud Drive or On My iPhone, is the most reliable option. AirDrop to a Mac works well. Emailing it to yourself often does not, because the archive can be large enough to bounce.

The result is a single file named export.zip. On a phone, open Files, find it, and long-press to uncompress it. On a Mac or PC, double-click.

Two practical notes. The export includes everything, with no way to select categories or date ranges, so there is no "just the last year" option. And the export runs on demand only; there is no scheduled or automatic version, which means anything you want kept has to be exported again later.

Uncompressing export.zip gives you a folder, usually called apple_health_export, with a handful of items in it.

export.xml is the main file and the big one. It contains every sample the Health app holds, one record element per measurement, with a type, a source, a start and end time, and a value. A person with an Apple Watch and a few years of history can easily have several million records in a file that runs to hundreds of megabytes or more.

export_cda.xml holds the clinical records, in the standard clinical document format hospitals use. If you have connected a health system through Health Records, this is where those allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures, and vitals live. If you have not connected anything, this file is small or absent.

An electrocardiograms folder appears if you have taken ECGs on an Apple Watch. Each one is a PDF, readable on its own, which makes this the single most useful part of the export for anybody taking results to a cardiologist.

A workout-routes folder holds GPX files, one per outdoor workout with GPS, readable by mapping and training software.

That is the whole archive. There are no images, no documents you scanned, and no notes. Health is a data store, not a document store.

Opening export.xml is where most people stop. A text editor may refuse to load it, a browser may hang trying to render it, and Excel will not import it in any useful shape. This is not a mistake on your part. The file was designed for programs, not people.

The realistic options, in order of effort.

Use a converter. Several free and paid tools, including web apps, desktop apps, and open-source scripts, take export.xml and produce CSV files split by data type: one for steps, one for heart rate, one for sleep. That is what you want if the destination is a spreadsheet. If you go this route with a web-based converter, understand that you are uploading your health history to somebody else's server, and read who they are first. A tool that runs locally on your own computer is the safer choice.

Use a third-party app on the phone instead of the built-in export. Several health data apps can read the Health store directly with your permission and export a filtered CSV for one data type and one date range, which is usually what people actually wanted. This avoids the giant file entirely.

Write a few lines of code, if that is something you do. The XML structure is simple and well documented by the community, and parsing it into a dataframe is a short exercise.

One thing to check before you start: the source of each record. If you have used more than one device or app, the same walk can appear multiple times from different sources, and naive totals double-count. Any decent converter exposes the source field so you can filter.

If the goal is that somebody else can keep an eye on your health data, the export is the wrong tool. Apple builds sharing directly into the Health app, and it updates continuously instead of being a dead snapshot.

In the Health app, open the Sharing tab at the bottom. Choose to share with someone, pick a contact who has an iPhone, and select which categories to share: activity, heart rate, mobility, medications, labs, and others depending on what you have. They accept the invitation, and a dashboard of your shared categories appears in their Health app under Sharing.

The recipient sees highlights and trends, and gets notified about changes Apple considers significant, like a meaningful drop in walking steadiness or an irregular rhythm notification. It is genuinely good for an adult child keeping half an eye on an aging parent, and both people can stop the sharing at any time.

Know the limits before you rely on it. It shares data categories, not documents; nobody is reading a discharge summary through it. The trends and highlights view is a summary layer, not a raw feed. Both people need an iPhone with a recent iOS version and to be signed into iCloud. And availability varies by region.

There is a parallel feature for sharing with a doctor, where your data goes to a participating health system so the care team can see it in their own record. Support for that depends on the hospital, and most families will find the person-to-person sharing more immediately useful.

Separately from all the fitness data, the Health app can hold your actual medical record, pulled directly from participating hospitals and clinics.

To set it up, open Health, go to the Browse tab, and look for Health Records. Search for your hospital or health network, sign in with the same username and password you use for its patient portal, and authorize the connection. Within a minute or two your data appears in the Health app.

What comes across is the clinical data the health system exposes through the standard interface: allergies, conditions and diagnoses, immunizations, lab results with reference ranges, medications, procedures, and vital signs. Many systems also send clinical notes. On iOS 26 and later, medications you are taking and the doses you log are part of the picture too.

This is worth understanding for what it is. It is a read-only copy of the coded parts of your chart, updated automatically, not a portal. You cannot message a doctor or schedule an appointment through it. And you can connect several health systems at once, which is the genuinely useful part, because it is one of the few places a person's records from three hospitals sit side by side.

It also depends entirely on your hospital participating. Coverage is broad among large systems and patchy among smaller practices. If your hospital does not appear in the search, there is nothing to configure; it is not connected yet.

Everything in Health Records is included in the export_cda.xml file when you run a full export. Reading that file is a job for software, which brings us to the more practical question.

Here is the situation this section is for. A parent has a diagnosis. They have an iPhone and they connected the hospital to Health Records, so their labs and medications are on their phone. Two adult children in other states are trying to help. The information exists and it is stuck on one device.

The Apple tools each solve part of it and none of it completely. The full export produces a clinical file that requires software to read. Health Sharing shares data categories in a summary view rather than the record. And nothing in Health holds the scanned paper, the discharge instructions, or the voicemail from the nurse line, which is often where the important part is.

The KeptWell iOS app is built for exactly this gap. On the patient's own iPhone, with their permission, it reads the clinical records they have connected in Health and syncs them into a shared care circle: allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures, vitals, and clinical notes. On iOS 26 and later it also reads medications and the doses they log. The Apple Health integration page covers the setup.

Three things about how it works are worth stating plainly. The sync is read-only, so KeptWell reads from Health and never writes back into it. Consent is category by category, so the patient chooses what to share rather than flipping one switch. And it runs on the patient's own device; a family member cannot pull the patient's health data from their own phone, because there is nothing to pull from. The patient starts it.

Once the data is in the circle, everyone the patient invited sees the same records on their own phones, and the uploads that were never in any portal go in beside them: the photographed handout, the discharge summary, the recording of the appointment.

Health Records only works with participating organizations. If yours is not there, the data has to come from the portal instead, and the record download guide covers that in detail.

The short version. Sign into the portal, find the Sharing Hub or Document Center, and download the record as a PDF, a structured file, or both. Do it for each health system the person has records at.

Downloaded PDFs are a snapshot, so plan on repeating it after any hospitalization or major change. Uploading them into a shared record means at least everyone is reading the same snapshot rather than four different ones.

And a portal connection is the more durable route where it is available. A MyChart connection into a KeptWell circle imports the records and keeps pulling, so nobody has to remember to re-download.

Health data is worth a moment of caution that step counts on a fitness app are not, so a few honest notes.

Web-based XML converters receive your entire health history. Some are run by careful people and some are not. Prefer a tool that runs locally on your computer, and if you use a web one, check who operates it and what they say they do with uploads.

Deleting the export when you are done is worth doing. It is a complete copy of years of data, and it usually ends up in a Downloads folder that gets backed up to three places.

Once your data leaves the Health app, Apple's protections stop applying to it. Whatever you send it to has its own policies, and those are the ones that govern from then on.

For KeptWell specifically: data in a circle is visible only to the people the patient invited, KeptWell does not sell data and does not train AI models on your records, and there are no marketing tracking pixels on logged-in pages. Being straight about the limits too: KeptWell does not currently offer a Business Associate Agreement or claim HIPAA compliance, and you can read the full detail on the data and privacy page and how the AI works.

None of this should stop you from getting the record to the people who need it. It should just be a decision you make on purpose.