Officials at a Los Angeles hospital are confident that good things will come from their integration of Apple's HealthKit platform.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center officials over the weekend said that more than 80,000 patients now have access to the platform, enabling them to synch their health and fitness apps and devices with the hospital's medical records and contribute everything from steps taken to blood pressure readings.
“This is just another set of data that we’re confident our physicians will take into account as they make clinical and medical judgments,” Darren Dworkin, the hospital's chief information officer, told BloombergBusiness. “We don’t really, fully know and understand how patients will want to use this and we’re going to basically stand ready to learn by what will happen.”
“Rather than turn it on as sort of an opt-in, we’ve basically enabled it for all of our patients,” Dworkin added. “The opt-out is just don’t use it.”
The implementation is the largest yet for Apple, which counts the Mayo Clinic, Duke University Hospital, Partners HealthCare, Mt. Sinai Health and Ochsner Health among its earliest partners. Officials say more than 900 health, medical and fitness apps can now integrate with the platform, which was rolled out last year.
More recently, Apple has been touting the Apple Watch – which was unveiled in February, officially became available last week and can synch with HealthKit – and the ResearchKit platform, which was announced at the same time as the Apple Watch and is targeted at providers looking to gather data from consumers for research studies and other projects.
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Apple's HealthKit offers promise for small hospitals, too
