“At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an image flashed up on the screen behind VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. It was a screen shot from Apple’s new Health app (or a mockup thereof), showing a user’s blood glucose level,” Mark Sullivan reports for VentureBeat. “But Apple biffed the measurement for blood glucose level, as Aaron Rowe of biochemical sampling device maker Integrated Plasmonics pointed out. It’s measured in mg/dL. Apple’s slide said ‘mL/dL.'”
“Of course, this probably says nothing about the finished version of the Apple Health app we’ll see released with iOS 8 next fall. But it does raise an important issue for any company embarking on the new frontier of healthcare biosensing and informatics, no matter what form: To achieve the vision of a unified, consumer-driven health platform, they’re going to have to get the real, clinical healthcare stuff right,” Sullivan reports. “‘It will be really important for companies to justify their interpretations of the information they provide to achieve physician buy in,’ said Dr. Molly Maloof, a San Francisco Bay Area clinical physician focused on health optimization. ‘Otherwise, these consumer-focused devices will be written off as health toys rather than health tools.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Oh, please. This is just silly.
Especially since keynote presentations are created by the firm Apple uses for all public announcement venues and they take raw concepts and flow from the Apple folks and work them into slideware. There is a lot of back and forth, of course, and maybe someone should have caught that, but in the immense pressure everyone is under leading up to these events I’m always amazed how few mistakes there are.
Oops, someone made a typo. It happens. I doubt it was an actual screen shot from an app. Talk about making a mountain from a molehill.
And doctors and hospitals already trust iOS, iPads and iPhones with their patient’s records and information. I’m sure that someone could go back and find a typo in some of the Objective-C code put on screen at some keynote as well. These are for demo and informational purposes, not showing actual in-use apps.
Oh No!!!! A typo! Apple is doomed!
It just means that a graphic designer responsible for creating the slide messed up. Under Steve, he would have been screamed at until he cried and quit.
Ha!! As if the health community was trusty or they did not make mistakes.
“But it does raise an important issue for any company embarking on the new frontier of healthcare biosensing and informatics, no matter what form: To achieve the vision of a unified, consumer-driven health platform, they’re going to have to get the real, clinical healthcare stuff right,”
Sure, any company, including those in the health community themselves.
Aaron Rowe you are really ignorant to the fact that healthcare biosensing informatics is not a new frontier; Apple would be only one more company to be doing it through their mobile hardware.
One word – Beta
Talk about nitpickey … I am a type-1 diabetic and would bet 95% of other diabetics would have never noticed. Its the number that matters to the user.
My wife is also diabetic, and I’m sure you’re right, even with her usual attention to detail, she would probably have missed it, too.
But I’m also an aquarium keeper, and water hardness has several different ways it is measured, usually with wildly different numbers, but sometimes not so far off. Salinity has two measurements side by side on a refractometer that could easily be confused. I could understand someone looking at the different nomenclature and wondering what the desired range would be in that “new” measurement.
Nitpicky could just save her life someday. And yours.
Thankfully, Apple is just trying to put a better transmission in the car, not reinvent the wheel. 🙂
“Nitpicky could just save her life someday. And yours.”
Not implying that Apple shouldn’t get it right, they should. And if HealthKit were an FDA approved monitoring device, it should be nitpicked.
But it’s simply a repository for data collection. Any type-1 diabetic who makes dosing decisions based on a App that got a “g” mixed up with an “L” would be a total moron.
And yet, it’s still better than the Obamacare website. I bet they got some Google programmers to design that site. 😉
Another jerk-off trying to bring politics into an Apple news site . . . . You’re REALLY trying to compare an enormous website with a mobile app???
Don’t feed the trolls.
I’m confident that Google or Microsoft programmers could have done a better job than the Obamacare website people did. No matter your politics, that was a cluster**k of epic magnitude.
Sounds like Mr Rowe is a bitter asshat… Never mind that I’ve never even heard of Integrated Plasmonics.
I have an iOS 8 beta and in the data collection screen for Blood Glucose it shows “mg/dL”. The screenshot must have been an old mockup shot.
Carry on…
I’m betting he has few friends.
One other thing… the Health app offers a substantial number of metrics. From the looks of it Apple is suggesting there is a lot of data to be gathered on a fairly regular basis. Interesting they would think this because that would imply you’re going to be wearing/using quite a number of medical/health devices…
Or maybe just one. 😀
The app showing mL/dL was a third party app from Epic Systems, not Apple.
Sounds like Sullivan still needs to earn the trust of his publisher, and his publisher still needs to EARN the trust of the public.
Thank you Dr Maloof for your own personal opinion.
According to her LinkedIn profile, “I see the human body as a data science of encoded systems biology.” I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out what that jargon filled statement means. She also describes herself as follows: “Digital health pioneer. I advise, mentor, and consults [sic] for a variety of early stage health & science technology (hardware, software, mobile, wearable, biotech) companies.” Really, maybe she shouldn’t be so tough on the slide maker.
She graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 2011. She completed just a little over a year of postgraduate residency training. I would say based on her experience as a practicing phsycian, her opinion is, in MY opinion, worthless.
The problem with her description of the human body is that no two people are the same, no two illnesses are the same (even the same disease/condition reacts differently in different people due to a huge range of variables from diet to environment to age, etc.).
There’s a reason they call it the “practice” of medicine. There rarely, if ever, is THE answer for a disease in all people. Mostly it is “Here is the recommended treatment that works on XX% of people, so try this first. If that doesn’t work, try YY and then ZZ. After that you’re on your own.”
Medicine is heavily dependent on science, but in reality it is an art of evaluating symptoms and discovering the best treatment for that one person.
I am confident that more man hours/workers are dealing with money matters than providing health care services in our broken health care system. Just look at the number of workers and the man hours spent in insurance company offices where there is no patient contact or care provided, not to mention all the workers in the business offices of hospitals and clinics, or the proportion of time spent by doctors and nurses doing work related to billing versus providing patient care.
It is no wonder that we consumers want more devices to provide us with more information so that we can take a more active role in our own actual health care both independently and together with our health care professionals. We, as health care consumers spend far more time dealing with our own personal health care and that of our loved ones than all of our health care providers combined. We are open to any additional tools that can help us do the job better and at less cost and with less pain and suffering. That is the big story behind Apple getting into the health care game.
Paperwork, or documentation, takes up as much as a third of a physician’s workday; and for many practicing doctors, these administrative tasks have become increasingly intolerable, a source of deteriorating professional morale. Having become physicians in order to work with patients, doctors instead find themselves facing piles of charts and encounter and billing forms, as well as the innumerable bureaucratic permutations of dozens of health insurance companies.
(NY Times, By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
Published: April 8, 2010)
Having been in practice for over 40 years, as opposed approximately Dr Chen’s 10 years, I can offer a longer perspective. The worst of times began in the mid-1980’s with the rise of managed care organizations, before she even granduated from medical school. While the situation is still more onerous than I would like, it’s better than it used to be. She vastly oversimplifies the situation for today’s paperwork requirements. I don’t know her motives for doing so. Nor do I know yours for posting this quote, since it seems to have nothing to do with the error on the slide at the WWDC.
I have no “motive” I was merely responding to ET’s comment regarding the time doctor’s spend on paperwork and away from patients. However, I am curious what YOUR motive is posting as a unregistered user who claims to be a physician of forty years. You may notice on threads on the internet, commenters respond to other commenters in addition to the cited story.
…further, of the four physicians I know personally in my city, three of them are arranging for early retirement to escape the fraudulent and bureaucratic future they see n the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
I find your claim to be a “practicing physician of over forty years” just not believable.
I believe what you say about four physicians. I don’t care if you believe me.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to retire BEFORE I saw what the ACA was doing to my practice. They might find out they get paid more often.
I work in a setting with a lot of unfunded patients, supported by county funds which come from property taxes, a nutty way to pay for health care. One of my patients just showed up the other day proudly saying her bill today was being covered by a Blue Cross policy which she obtained through our state’s online market place.
Well, it’s a Wednesday afternoon and you’re exchanging comments with a retired guy. Seems like a lot of time to be away from your patients and your paperwork. While not an MD myself, I was raised by one, so I find it not credible that your position is contrary to every doctor I have ever known…and more importantly, your subtle references as ACA as a wonderful thing convince me that you are no doctor at all but a mere shill. If anyone wishes to see the end result of ACA, they need to look no further than Veteran’s Administration health care.
Interesting debate. I didn’t expect to change your mind. I don’t take your comments personally.
Dang. Blew my cover.
I want a second opinion…
Like a draw in chess…
you were supposed to say: “okay, you’re ugly too.”
yeah, “Doc” except you were drawn and quartered.
Actually, the healthcare provided to ACTIVE duty military, also a government program, is quite good. Heck, I got free laser eye surgery when I was active duty. It comes down to resource allocation and priorities: We say that we care about veterans, but we don’t put our money where our collective mouths are.
note that I said “Veterans.”
Thanks for your response. Actually, I am a registered user, have been for years. But I don’t want my professional life tied up in any way with my MDN posts. I usually try to keep it separate. So for this one post, I didn’t use my registered name. I graduated from medical school in 1971, so I’ve been filling out forms for a long time. I have a perspective that is different from Dr Chen’s.
As for what ET said, he’s right on. The huge overhead in commercial insurance is ridiculous and a cost policy holders have to bear. Trying to reduce that burden is one feature of the ACA which requires that 85% of premium dollars be spent on beneficiary services, the remainer having to be refunded to the policy holders. A bunch of my patients get refunds every year.
Anyway, I don’t see how the amount of bureaucracy in insurance companies directly translates into “consumers” wanting more control over their health. I can only applaud individuals taking more responsibility for their own health. Doctors are mostly disease oriented, trying to fix problems after they occur. “Consumers,” on the other hand, can make decisions which can prevent disease from occurring.
I can vouch for what Practicing Physician says. My podiatrist said about 1-2 years ago he could do 9-12 surgeries a week at the hospital across the street from his practice. He would take the paperwork back to his office, or do it at home, etc. Now his surgeries have been cut in half or less because of the new paperwork requirements, and not just for him.
All information has to be put into computers immediately after surgery. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and the head nurse all have to have computers so they can input their information. The patient cannot leave the recovery room until all three people finish putting in their information. The patient then can be transferred to another room (this ties up the operating room). The patient cannot be discharged until all information is input.
So the time where the doctor could perform surgeries is now taken up by paperwork, which is more and more demanding. I don’t think it’s bad that it all is required to be computerized, but between insurance and government health care requirements, our health care professionals are spending more time on paperwork than patient care.
Totally agree. I hear they messed up with the iPhones shown in the demo as well — apparently they won’t actually be 7 feet wide by 15 feet tall.
Funny, dude !
with the lightning fire rapid, ubiquitous adoption of iOS in the medical community, this article is totally laughable to the medical community, reading this on iOS. YES, Dr. Maloof, Apple and other software devs must get these measurements right or else physicians will not want to buy in – for instance if your systolic blood pressure is over 180 does Siri call in the medivac chopper? Buy more life insurance when your bad cholesterol levels are elevated? Dial your Mom when you are eating sweets?
That will be based on the working product not a mock up slide at a conference trying to give a flavour of what such a product will look to software developers. Health professionals want to be rather careful on that front considering the appalling record they have for their own products and the claims there of.
And chances are the images on screen were complete mockups because they would have been prepared a while ago and who knows how long workable versions have been available, plus it’s a beta. Hardly a goof.
Eh it was an indication of the look of the software dumbos not a working product. They need to realise that design is design and health products are health products, don’t knock our simulations and we won’t knock your deficiencies on the design front in your products which are usually appalling.
Blood glucose is measured in the USA as mg/dl but in Europe (and the rest of the world?) it is measured as mmol/l. Perhaps the slide simply conflated the scales for these alternative metrics? In any event, I agree with others that whatever metric is used in one’s country, patients who monitor their blood glucose levels know what the numbers mean …even if they don’t know exactly what the measurement unit is.
For what it is worth: hemoglobin A1c (“HbA1c”) is a biological marker of average blood glucose level over 30 days; it conveys different information than blood glucose level at a given moment, but can be useful in its own way. When you get a blood work-up at a physical examination, your doctor will look at HbA1c, for example.
Yep. I posted a reply to myself above to point that out, but it didn’t make it in for some reason.
If you were to convert mg/dl to something of an algorithm, the numbers would be close to that mmol/l number for a “normal” range. *That* could be very confusing, and even deadly. (And who is to say that someone wasn’t doing that? Seems exceedingly unlikely, but certainly possible.)
And yet there were multiple low votes to my post. Whatever. You get it. A few of us do. Thanks!
* logarithm, not algorithm. Not sure where my brain was. Low blood sugar, perhaps. 🙂
Breaking news: typo found in beta software! Apple has made plenty of medical-related hires recently and in the UK is working with the National Health Service so I’m pretty sure all will be well come autumn.
Dear God, don’t give anyone such an idea! Those sites will pop up faster than those stupid unboxing videos, or tear down videos from people who buy a product just to rip it apart.
Most software related to blood sugar levels allows for a switch between the two systems. All that the screen display shows is that there were no diabetics working on that project.
After all of the comments about the goof you can be sure that Apple will have corrected the goof – and other companies will add it to their list of goofs not to make.
They did get 1.618 right on the calculator display. A nice design reference.