I don’t like hyperbole in healthcare marketing. I also was skeptical when Apple introduced its consumer-centric HealthKit platform last summer. But this week’s announcement of ResearchKit by the Cupertino, California-based tech giant has me intrigued.
Apple unveiled ResearchKit on Monday as part of its tightly choreographed rollout of the Apple Watch. ResearchKit is an open-source platform — something new for Apple — that should be in general release next month.
“As we worked on HealthKit, we came across an even broader impact that iPhone could make, and that is on medical research,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said,” according to mHealth News. “Perhaps the most profound change iPhone will make is on our health,” Cook added.
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Apple executives envision ResearchKit serving as an aggregator of medical and health data from hundreds of millions of iPhone users worldwide, helping researchers identify and track subjects for their work. That’s a great idea, and would be an even greater idea if Apple follows the open-source model and builds or allows a third party to create an Android version.
The company described ResearchKit as a framework to help medical researchers design apps for clinical studies, speeding up data collection on an exponential scale.
“One of the biggest challenges researchers have is recruiting,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, in a story from Health Data Management. “Small sample sizes — sometimes 50 to 100 people — limits our understanding of diseases. Another issue is subjective data.”
In a video released by Apple, Kathryn Schmitz, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said that the ability to send out surveys to iPhone users at regular intervals to help people improve their health is a “game changer.” Normally, I frown on such buzzwords in digital health because I’ve seen so many failures and so much vaporware, but Schmitz may actually be right.
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She explained that a mailing of more than 60,000 letters resulted in just 305 women qualifying for clinical trials at Penn. The new technology should help address this problem. “This is the answer. This is exactly where medicine is going,” Schmitz said.
Medicine is also going toward personalization as genomics grows in popularity and falls in price. Hopefully, someone will develop apps on the ResearchKit platform that helps make sense of the massive amounts of genomic data that sequencing is just starting to generate.
According to Williams, ResearchKit will provide academicians and practitioners alike with nearly continuous data flows, not just occasional “snapshots” of information, so they will be able to track patient symptoms more accurately. “But perhaps the most significant challenge is the communication flow,” Williams said. “When you participate in a study, you often don’t hear back until the very end of the study, if at all.”
Communication among clinicians and with patients has long been a problem in healthcare. Any technology that improves communication should be embraced, as long as it fits clinician workflow and adapts to consumer preferences. Consumers and professionals alike seem to love their smartphones and mobility in general, so the iPhone isn’t a bad vehicle to address this issue.
In any case, some modernization is long overdue. “Methods for conducting medical research haven’t really changed in decades,” Dr. Mike O’Reilly, Apple’s vice president for medical technologies, noted in the video. If ResearchKit performs as advertised, it really could change the game, and that’s no exaggeration.
Obviously, privacy is always an issue when handling and moving health data around. In an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph last month, Cook was adamant about his company’s commitment to privacy.
“None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy,” Cook told The Telegraph.
Cook didn’t specifically address health information in that statement, but the article did say he advised that any health, financial and other personal data be encrypted, whether on mobile devices or desktop computers.
If Apple gets the privacy part right, it might even give the foundering HealthKit a chance to succeed where personal health records and consumer health platforms from Google, Microsoft and dozens of other, smaller vendors have failed. I’m still not convinced PHRs are going to take off anytime soon, but ResearchKit, aimed at professionals rather than consumers, seems like a winner.
[Photo from Flickr user Health Gauge]
