While most of us focus on the consumer, education or enterprise applications of Apple’s devices, there’s another huge market where Cupertino’s products are making waves: the medical profession.
According to a new report from Reuters, 14 out of the United States’ top 23 hospitals have already rolled out a pilot program for Apple’s HealthKit service, which acts as a one-stop shop for compiling everything from blood pressure information to heart rates.
As more and more of us use fitness and health-tracking devices, and other pieces of wearable tech in our daily lives, HealthKit is helping doctors respond appropriately to the mass of patient-generated data they’re now able to look at. One doctor at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is quoted as saying that 250,000 patients in his system collect similar health data.
“Can I interface to every possible device that every patient uses?” they say. “No. But Apple can.”
It’s a timely reminder of just how big the market is for Apple as it goes down the digital health route. The Apple Watch will likely be a big step in the right direction, and Apple is obviously aware of this, given the company’s hiring of biosensor experts in recent years. Apple is also courting and recruiting informal industry advisers at places like Harvard Medical School to help make introductions to industry decision-makers.
Meanwhile, competitors Google and Samsung are in only the early stages of talks with a fraction of the hospitals Apple is working with.
IDC Health Insights claims 70 percent of health care organizations worldwide will invest in mobile health technology, such as apps, wearables, remote monitoring and virtual care, by 2018. Given that the U.S. health care market alone is valued at $3 trillion, that’s a pretty giant market for Apple.
Plus, Tim Cook gets to live up to his self-professed mission of making Apple a “force for good in the world.”
Every way you look at it, Apple’s got everything to gain.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Top U.S. hospitals are already putting Apple HealthKit to work”
If Apple could get just a third of that $3 trillion dollar business they’d easily reach that trillion dollar market cap. It appears Apple still has room to grow revenue no matter what Wall Street says to the contrary.
“Experts say that there will eventually be a need for common standards to ensure that data can be gathered from both Apple’s system and its competitors.
“How do we get Apple to work with Samsung? I think it will be a problem eventually,” said Brian Carter, a director focussed on personal and population health at Cerner, an electronic medical record vendor that is integrated with HealthKit.”
This is the key point. Apple will HAVE to work towards common spec for data gathering/sharing or they will likely be sued. The populations health should not be held captive by one company longterm requiring an iOS device to track data to be used by medical entities.
All the big boys will have a chunk of this industry.