Below is MobiHealthNews' transcript of Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi's presentation about Apple's new health tracking platform HealthKit and its companion app Health. This was just a small part of the iOS8 presentation at the WWDC 2014 event this week:
"Now, something that we all care about: health. Developers have created a vast array of healthcare devices and accompanying applications -- everything from monitoring your activity level, to your heart rate, to your weight, and chronic medical conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. But up until now the information gathered by those applications has lived in silos. You can't get a single comprehensive picture of your health situation. But now you can, with HealthKit. HealthKit provides a single place that applications can contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health.
"And HealthKit comes with a corresponding application: Health. With Health you can monitor all of your metrics that you are most interested in -- your activity. But not just that, you can use third party applications. Now, we carefully protect your privacy so you have total control over which applications have access to which part of your healthcare information.
"But you could, for instance, provide different activity, weight, heart rate information to the Nike app. And Nike is working to integrate HealthKit and use that information to help you in your pursuit of your personalized fitness goals.
"Now, we're also working with the Mayo Clinic, innovators in healthcare. With their integration with HealthKit, they are going to be able that when a patient takes, let's say a blood pressure reading, HealthKit automatically notifies their app, and their app is automatically able to check whether that reading is within that patient's personalized, healthcare paramaters' thresholds. If not, it can contact the hospital proactively, notify a doctor, and that doctor can reach back to that patient, providing more timely care.
"Now, we think this is going to be really important for healthcare and the CEO of the Mayo Clinic agrees. He says that "We believe Apple's HealthKit will revolutionize the health industry, how the health industry interacts with people. We are proud to be at the forefront of this innovative technology with the Mayo Clinic app." We agree.
"Now, we are also working with the leaders of healthcare applications like Epic Systems. They provide the technology that enables hospitals serving over 100 million Americans. Now with their integration of HealthKit patients at these leading institutions will be able to get closer in sharing their information with their doctors. That is Health."
