“Ttechnology giant [Apples]’s new mobile operating system includes features that make it easier for clinicians to collect and track data from health and fitness tracking applications embedded in patients’ devices,” Clint Boulton reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Apple’s new health care focus comes with consumer interest in wearable devices increasing and health care providers focused on preventative care, a goal made easier through better monitoring of patient health.”
“Hospitals are under federal regulatory pressure to improve how they treat patients. One way to do this is by encouraging and making it easier for patients to share anything from glucose counts to blood pressure levels – health indicators that are becoming increasingly easier for users to track courtesy of fitness trackers and apps and accompanying hardware made for devices such as the iPhone,” Boulton reports. “But the data generated from these apps and devices cannot be extracted to a third-party platform that clinicians would be likely to use. This makes it difficult for them to create a holistic profile of patient health.”
“Apple is trying to change that with HealthKit, a software framework it is including in iOS 8 this fall,” Boulton reports. “With an aggregation framework that could federate data exchange between 40,000 iOS health apps currently in its app store, Apple is taking on an emerging middleman role at a crucial time in the evolution both of health-care management and the growth of the wearables market. That role could grow if it launches a wearable device, which could track sleep activity, blood glucose and blood oxygen levels.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
U.S. FDA details high-level meeting with Apple: ‘Moral obligation to do more’ with health, innovative sensors – June 9, 2014
How Apple is leading the healthcare wearables revolution – June 8, 2014