Apple
Health

July 1, 2014 -- Last month Apple announced its inevitable foray into the healthcare arena. It's a market too big to ignore. The first product is Healthkit.

The visible part of Apple's strategy is on the consumer side. This side is perplexing; a few years ago I thought that Google Health would be a winner but it fizzled. Will Apple succeed where Google, Microsoft, and others haven�t?

Joseph Kvedar of Connected Health offers an interesting perspective, My Wish List for Apple�s HealthKit Initiative. He says that Apple's strength is design and its weakness is analytics. Both are necessary to thrive in this market; Apple's success is not guaranteed.

Another question regards the provider side. Most of the doctors and nurses I know use iOS not Android (but this is anecdotal only -- no flames, please!) What I�d like to know is, what are Apple�s plans for this audience?

I have worked on a product for the provider side, gambling on iOS as the platform of choice, and have built NurseMind, an iOS-based checklist app for nurses. It is a standalone but would benefit from integration with Epic, Cerner, GE, etc. Apple could become the user-friendly front-end for us all with a larger ecosystem that supports health data of all types.

My prediction? They�re already working on it.

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