Dive Brief:
- Apple Inc.'s HealthKit is soon to be part of trials focusing on childhood diabetes with Stanford University Hospital and cancer and heart disease at Duke University. With HealthKit, which is still in development, Apple hopes to work with hospitals across the country to help manage and improve care and reduce costs for patients with chronic conditions.
- Other medical device makers are reportedly in talks with Apple and the providers to participate in the trials. According a company spokesperson, DexCom Inc.'s blood sugar monitoring equipment is talking with Apple, Stanford and the Food and Drug Administration about integrating with HealthKit. At the trial at Stanford, young Type 1-diabetes patients will be sent home with an iPod touch to monitor blood sugar levels between visits. DexCom would send information to HealthKit which could then be uploaded into Epic's MyChart, where physicians can access the data and track patients' blood sugar levels over time.
- HealthKit is acting as the link to get measured data into the hands of providers. Previously, this information was sent in by fax or phone. The technology will allow physicians to warn patients of potential problems more quickly. For example, Stanford is considering setting up alerts to notify patients through MyChart if there are problems with their glucose levels.
Dive Insight:
There are a lot of steps involved in the process of getting health information from the patient to the provider and privacy is always a concern when this occurs. Apple has considered creating a HealthKit Certification for third-party developers that would regulate how the information is stored and sold. Current practice in the health app industry is to sell users' data without the individual's consent; However, Apple's latest developer license agreement prohibits developers from selling information from the HealthKit app for advertising purposes. The information can only be used for health and fitness services.
"Apple faces this increasingly tricky balance of ensuring they are carefully regulating the data developers have access to, with developers' desire to create ever more innovative apps and services," Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight, told the Financial Times. "Apple has always closely controlled what comes through the App Store, far more so than Google."
In an industry that has suffered numerous health information breaches in recent years, Apple may be an outsider that can come in and shape information security. That said, Apple itself was just the target of a breach of its iCloud service that exposed the private images of numerous celebrities.