Reuters is exclusively reporting that Apple Inc has been discussing how its “HealthKit” service will work with health providers at Mount Sinai, the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins and Allscripts, a competitor to electronic health records provider Epic Systems.
If Apple is successful with HealthKit, it would go a long way to centralising medical information for users in the US.
“Currently, this data is being collected by thousands of third-party health care software applications and medical devices, but it isn’t centrally stored,” Christina Farr writes for Reuters. “Apple also hopes physicians will use this data to better monitor patients between visits – with the patient’s consent — so the doctors can make better diagnostic and treatment decisions.”
“Apple is going into this space with a data play,” Forrester Research’s health care analyst Skip Snow told Reuters. “They want to be a hub of health data.”
Apple is set to launch HealthKit to the public in iOS 8 this September.
