Top L.A. hospital using HealthKit to monitor 80,000 patients

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Apple's reputation as a mobile health company is growing. Photo: Apple
Apple's reputation as a mobile health company is growing. Photo: Apple

Apple’s ambitions as a mobile health company took a giant leap forward over the weekend, as HealthKit was connected to more than 80,000 patient files at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

This means that Cedars-Sinai doctors now have the ability to take iOS Health data into account when making clinical and medical judgments — allowing physicians to easily access patients’  weight, blood pressure, steps taken, glucose levels, and oxygen saturation levels as gathered from their iOS devices.

Speaking with Bloomberg, Cedars-Sinai’s chief information officer Darren Dworkin described it as something of an experiment.

“We don’t really, fully know and understand how patients will want to use this and we’re going to basically stand ready to learn by what will happen,” he said.

Given that the Apple Watch contains plenty of Health-related fitness-tracking capabilities, it’s certainly good timing on the part of the hospital. It also ties in with an ambition Tim Cook described back in February:

“HealthKit, I think, is going to be profound because it enables you to take all of the information from different apps and if you desire to you can share that information with a physician, you can share it or you can place it in a way that you can begin to correlate the data and find out some pretty interesting things about your health and be able to monitor it.”

Currently more than 900 health, medical and fitness apps are integrated with HealthKit, according to Apple. Back in February, it was reported that 14 out of the top 23 hospitals in the United States have already rolled out pilot programs related to HealthKit, which debuted last year with iOS 8.

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