Dive Brief:
- Samsung has announced digital health partnerships with 24 partners, including Nike, Aetna, Cigna, Cleveland Clinic, Humana and Stanford University.
- To one degree or another, the partners are working with Samsung's competitor to the Apple HealthKit, known as The Samsung Digital Health Platform. Like HealthKit, the Samsung platform collects and knits together health data from personal health devices and smart phones.
- Samsung partner Nike is also a marquee partner of Apple's and is working with HealthKit, but other Apple partners, namely EMR vendor Epic Systems and the Mayo Clinic, don't seem to be working with the electronics giant.
Dive Insight:
The fight to become the platform of choice for mobile health data collections is heating up dramatically, with Apple, Microsoft and Samsung duking it out already. It's easy to imagine that the future will bring even more competition for control of the health data wearables and smartphones produce. After all, he who controls and make sense of the rapidly-proliferating sources of data can offer providers the organized information they so crave.
What's not clear here is how well these platforms will be able to integrate data into EMRs. With Epic Systems being the only EMR vendor working with any of these players to date, linking up any of these platforms smoothly with other EMRs is still in question. Still, it seems likely the IT powerhouses like Apple, Samsung and Microsoft will soon find robust EMR partners that can link up with their platforms. It's not a question of if, but when.