At Apple Today, the Doctors Have Sway

Personal health and fitness apps’ future in healthcare

The multitude of fitness apps and mobile health devices, like FitBit and the iBGStar Blood Glucose Meter, that have sprung up over the last five years is astounding. These products have allowed consumers to engage in personal tracking and social fitness through apps that allow them to track and share their own health and activity data. Mobile personal health technologies have achieved a critical mass, leading to Apple’s introduction of the Health app and HealthKit.

Before Apple’s announcement of HealthKit, individual fitness apps had large implications for how individuals could motivate themselves to practice better fitness and self-care. However, Apple’s move towards mobile healthcare technologies offers a more mature resource that the healthcare industry may be able to turn into a reliable clinical data stream. This type of data is already being referred to as patient generated health data (PGHD).

Consumers have been able to, for some time, purchase apps or devices that track a variety of health metrics: calories burned, time spent asleep or resting, hydration, blood sugar, or stress levels. Yet, Apple’s move is an unprecedented leap forward in the health informatics. As Apple’s Senior VP Craig Federighi articulated at WWDC on June 2nd, “Up until now the information gathered by those applications lives in silos. You can’t get a single comprehensive picture of your health situation. But now you can, with HealthKit.” Instead of having fitness apps store their data independently on one another, Apple will allow for all health information to be aggregated in one secure place.

Before this point, a person hoping to track each of their health metrics had to engage with multiple different apps or databases in order to do so, checking calories with one app, and heart rate with another. With HealthKit, this will no longer be the case.

Apple, partnering with a variety of major developers and healthcare providers, hopes to solve the problem by providing consumers a single location containing their aggregated health data. The front-end app, which will be released with iOS 8, is simply called Health, while HealthKit is a set of developer tools that allow individual fitness and health apps to communicate with one another and store data in a collective setting.

The backend structure provided by HealthKit is the true innovation. It will begin to allow for the clinical use of mobile consumer health and fitness data. This can be inferred from Apple’s carefully chosen partnerships.

Both Epic and the Mayo Clinic have begun developing apps that make use of HealthKit. Suggesting that soon patients will be able to push health data to Epic’s MyChart app or continuously update their Mayo clinic doctor with their heart rate or blood sugar levels in real-time. The potential for these systems to positively affect patient and physician engagement, care coordination, and clinical analytics is astounding. Considering this, the number of care providers and Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) companies that will transition to use mobile health monitoring systems is only going to grow.

This is somewhat worrisome. Apple’s integration of multiple fitness and health data streams into one has the potential to push personal health technologies into the medical research and clinical healthcare settings; however, a horde of superfluous or inaccurate health apps may hinder the adoption of these technologies by healthcare and HIT firms.

Questions regarding data quality, reliability, exchange and accessibility will continue to be widespread, and large-scale adoption will continue to be difficult before these challenges are addressed. Furthermore, healthcare professionals may be slow to adopt new technologies regardless of their benefit. Many healthcare professionals still find EHR’s to be inefficient and unnecessary.

Though there are still many hurdles to overcome, the opportunity for care providers to make use of patient generated health data is not being ignored. Soon these technologies will transition from casual personal fitness to serious clinical applications. Those firms on the forefront of this move will have a major hand in the adoption of PGHD and mobile data collection in healthcare.