Apple Health Medical Trials: HealthKit In Real Life

It's time Apple had a true test of wills in a real hospital setting with its HealthKit software. Woefully behind the times, most hospitals still rely on phone and fax to forward test results to patients. Apple hopes to assist with this as well as the reading of test results in-house.

Stanford University Hospital and Duke University will be working with Apple's HealthKit software with real human patients in the near future in a set of true trials.

Duke will work with Apple to develop a pilot to track weight, blood pressure, and other bits and pieces for patients with heart disease or cancer. Stanford University Hospital will be allowing Apple to work with physicians fro track blood sugar levels for children with diabetes.

Above and below you'll see some basic looks at the iPhone's Health App being released with iOS 8.

The HealthKit software included with iOS 8, Apple's next operating system release, will work with a number of regulated medical devices. For Stanford University Hospital, this means using a special glucose monitor that'll be able to connect with and send information to an iPhone and/or iPad.

Physician Rajiv Kumar at Stanford's pilot has suggested that "two young patients with diabetes have been chosen to participate." This is according to Rueters, where Duke University internal medicine pediatrician and director of mobile strategy Ricky Bloomfield says "this could eliminate the hassle of getting data from patients... [and] remove some of the error from patients' manually entering their data."

You'll find brands like Jawbone and Epic Systems will work with HealthKit right out the gate. Have a peek at our first HealthKit release as well as our extended HealtKkit tag portal for more information on this system and app.