Apple Health

Is healthcare Cupertino’s next big play?

Before we get to that the cutesy headline to this post would have been “iHealth,” but with the introduction of Apple Watch last year, it’s clear that Tim Cook is moving away from Jobsian “i” branding of its products. The i moniker will likely stick to existing products, but the direction is clear. iPhoto is being replaced with the new cross-platform Photos app, and the iWork branding is rarely used to describe the company’s productivity suite. Also note that it’s “Apple Pay” and not “iPay,” which sounds tacky. What I’d really like to see is the iMac name dropped from the next redesign of the all-in-one Macintosh. A fresh design with a name hearkening back to 1984: “The Mac.” (“Mac Pro” would remain for the Xeon-class workstation.)

Anyway — what’s the Next Big Thing for Apple? Matt Richman says it’s health care:

Though we’re still in the early stages of Apple Pay, I think Apple is planning to leverage those same strengths to create another uncopyable billion-dollar service. Consider what else Tim Cook mentioned during his prepared statement on last week’s earnings call:

There’s also been incredible interest in HealthKit, with over 600 developers now integrating it into their apps. Consumers can now choose to securely share their health and wellness metrics with these apps, and this has led to some great new and innovative experiences in fitness and wellness, food and nutrition, and healthcare. For example, with apps such as American Well, users can securely share data such as blood pressure, weight, or activity directly with physicians. And leading hospitals such as Duke Medicine, Stanford Children’s, and Penn Medicine are integrating data from HealthKit into their electronic medical records so that physicians can reach out to patients proactively when they see a problem that needs attention. With HealthKit and the iOS Health app, we believe we’re just at the beginning of amazing new health and wellness solutions for our customers.

In other words, Apple is laying the requisite foundations today to announce a healthcare service tomorrow. It’s building relationships with key players, enabling third party hardware innovation through HealthKit, getting people comfortable with iPhones as health repositories, and in the secure enclave and Touch ID, Apple already has a method to store and share healthcare data securely.

Over the next few years, Apple will add more sensors to the iPhone and Apple Watch that can be used to measure your health, and third-party medical accessories designed for use with iOS devices will continue to grow in popularity. The healthcare industry will salivate for the resulting data.

As Richman notes, healthcare is a $2,900,000,000,000 industry. Anyone who can make a device to function as the front man and facilitator for that industry stands to make a lot of money.