Apple’s Security Issues and Their Move into Healthcare

I’m on the record as being skeptical of Apple’s entrance into healthcare with Apple Health and HealthKit. I just don’t think they’ll dive deep enough into the intricacies of healthcare to really make a difference. They underestimate the complexity.

With that disclosure, I found a number of recent tweets about Apple and healthcare quite interesting. We’ll start first with this tweet that ties the recent nude celebrity photos that were made public after someone hacked the celebrities’ iCloud account together with Apple’s HealthKit release.

For those who don’t follow Apple, they have a big announcement planned for September 9, 2014. Rumors have the new sizes of the iPhone 6 could be announced and the new iWatch (or whatever they finally call it) will be announced alongside the iPhone 6. We’ll see if the announcement also brings more details on Apple Health and HealthKit which has been short on concrete details.

Even if Apple Health and HealthKit aren’t involved in the announcement, every smartwatch I’ve seen has had some health element to it. Plus, we shouldn’t be surprised if the iPhone 6 incorporates health and wellness elements as well. Samsung has already embedded health sensors in the S5. I imagine iPhone will follow suit.

With Apple doing more and more in healthcare, it does bring up some new security and privacy issues for them. In fact, this next tweet highlights one healthcare reaction by Apple that is likely connected with the iCloud security issues mentioned above.

This reminds me of a recent business associate policy I saw from a backup software vendor. They were willing to sign a business associate agreement with a healthcare organization, but only if it was their most expensive product and only if it was used to backup your data to your own cloud or devices. Basically, they just wanted to provide the software and not have to be responsible for the storage and security of the data. Apple is taking a similar approach by not allowing private health data to be stored in iCloud. Makes you wonder if Apple will sign a business associate agreement.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on Apple’s entrance into healthcare. They have a lot to learn about healthcare if they want their work in healthcare to be a success. Security and privacy is just one of those areas.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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