Nothing defines the above quote better than Apple itself. After pioneering the world of technology, Apple for a while has seen the potential to grow itself in the healthcare department. Even if you take a look at its latest product such as the Apple Watch, you will notice that healthcare and wellness have been a centralized core in its usage.
Apple now clearly wants its apps, services, and wearable strategies to play a huge part in making it a health-based service provider. And if reports are to be believed, they are aiming to become our personal health tracker and jumping into medical devices, researches, and more.
When you must have heard about Apple moving into healthcare, you must have been like, why? Why would a tech giant make a move towards healthcare out of all the other available venues? What have tech giants to do with our healthcare system? There may have been other questions too but the point is why, right? And that’s exactly, I’m sharing in this post.
There is no denying that Apple has been the dominant tech giant for years and, it continues to be so.
Now many new players have jumped into this such as Google and Amazon. Google has now started making phones, whereas Amazon has taken a keen interest in building home hardware. Both of these are where Apple has been dominating for years.
But all of them are now encroaching into what were previously Apple’s territories. And with them taking a bite of Apple’s profit while saturating the entire market, Apple has been indirectly forced and challenged to step into other fields to maintain or even increase their revenue every year.
And with healthcare full of potential, Apple understood that focusing on healthcare is one way they can continue to differentiate their products from the herd.
Apple Health and its Personal Health Record
Apples’ personal health record is considered to be the centralized pillar in Apple’s healthcare strategy. Apple first dropped a hint about stepping into the healthcare department in a 2013 patent for a wellness registry. But only until 2016, Apple made some serious roads in the direction through the personal health record startup known as the Glimpse.
Apple is its attempt to create a wellness app that people can relate with daily as a step tracker and the calendar-based activities that people would check daily as their first page In the health app. In the next pages, health data tracks and quantifies wellness metrics alongside nutrition, and sleep.
In 2018, Apple brought EMR data into people’s phone health records. Later in the same year, Apple announced its Health Kit. It was a health record API to third parties enabled by the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources.
Apple’s Research Kit and Care Kit
Apple is constantly pushing itself to help its developers to find it easier to use iPhone and to inculcate studies about Apple’s ecosystem in it. Both the Research Kit and the Care kit software developer kits (SDKs) are providing templates so that developers can quickly ready their applications.
Through Research Kit launched by Apple in 2015, it allowed several medical researchers to conduct studies using the iPhone. With this, Apple created an opportunity where recruiting for research became easier, large-scale studies become more feasible and enabled remote monitoring and diagnostics.
With Care Kit launched in 2016, Apple similarly created an opportunity for enabling hospitals to engage with patients before as well as after they leave the hospital.
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