Racking up yet another win in a string of deals with prominent health systems and hospitals, Apple has won Cedars-Sinai Medical Center over to running its HealthKit platform. According to Bloomberg, the agreement which connects 80,000 patients to HealthKit is the largest integration project done with HealthKit to date.
Apple caught a lead in the patient health data game early on, snagging high-profile Ochsner Health System as its first customer in October of last year. And HealthKit has continued to see success. A Reuters story reported in February that 14 of 23 top U.S. hospitals contacted by the news organization had rolled out a pilot program testing the platform. In other words, while it has formidable competition, Apple seems to have already become the platform of choice for experimenting with patient generated data.
It has to have helped that HealthKit was already set to connect with a wide range of consumer health tracking apps. Within months of its summer 2014 launch, Apple could boast a family of more than 60 apps that connected to the platform, including Withings app HealthMate, Weight Watchers Mobile, a Panera Bread app allowing users to plan meals at the store, a Mayo Clinic app, Epic’s MyChart portal app and more.
But Apple’s competitors in the consumer health space aren’t going to give up without a fight. With the wearables market reaching 21% of consumers, fellow behemoths like Samsung, Google and Microsoft will continue to challenge Apple for the patient-generated data crown.
Microsoft, for example, has launched a collection of wearables devices — including a fitness-tracking wristband, mobile health app and cloud-based health data platform called Microsoft Health. In Microsoft’s architecture, users store health and fitness data generated by wearables, which is, in turn collected by the Health app. And remember Microsoft’s HealthVault PHR? It finds new life here, as another place for patients to store the data they personally generate.
Google also announced its a fitness and health tracking platform last summer, dubbed Google Fit. Google Fit is an open platform offering the platform SDK freely to developers. At launch, its partners included Nike+, Adidas, Motorola, Runkeeper and HTC.
Samsung, for its part, has positioned itself in more of a support role to the wearables revolution. Last May it introduced the Samsung Simband, a reference architecture for wearables. It also released open health data cloud platform SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions), which takes data from multiple sources and drills down on the data to analyze the health status of individual users.
But despite the massive firepower behind Apple’s competitors, Apple seems to have slipped ahead and taken the marketing high ground. Expect to see lots of hospitals announce that HealthKit is their patient-generated data platform of choice over the next few years. It seems like Apple is doing the right thing at the right time.
