When Apple announced HealthKit, they announced a few healthcare partners including Epic. Many thought this was an interesting announcement, but I was (and still am) skeptical that anything really meaningful will come. As one person put it, we’re suppose to be excited that two of the most closed companies in the world are working together?
I recently saw the news come out that Epic’s main competitor, Cerner, announced that they’d integrated with Apple’s HealthKit. In fact, I believe their integration seems to have come out before Epic’s integration (unless I missed it, or maybe Epic just likes to keep quiet). Here’s a short excerpt from the Cerner announcement:
To me, HealthKit is about making it more convenient to manage your health and wellness, and share that information with the people that are helping you reach your goals. It’s less about trying to get real-time clinical insights or make new diagnoses. HealthyNow has the features that consumers and wellness experts are looking for in these apps, and by integrating with HealthKit, we’ve opened up the experience to a whole array of health apps for our members to choose from. This integration enables the feeding of key health metrics into our platform for sharing with health coaches, earning of incentive points, and identification of new opportunities to improve your health. By promoting healthier habits, consumers lower their premiums, health plans reduce their spend on treating avoidable diseases, and everyone lives a healthier life. (emphasis added)
The details on what Apple’s HealthKit would really do have been pretty foggy. Although, this paragraph illustrates where I figured HealthKit was going. Notice the part of the quote where I added emphasis. Cerner is just looking to suck data from HealthKit into Cerner. Maybe they have future plans to make Cerner data available to HealthKit, but the announcement seems to say they haven’t done so yet. This one way interface is exactly why I’m skeptical that HealthKit will really have a huge impact on healthcare.
What do you think? Have any of you integrated with HealthKit? I’d love to see if you have other views of where HealthKit might be headed.
