Healthkit

Apple Inc. is foraying into the healthcare sector by introducing a new application (app) “Healthkit” to manage consumer health data. As the world’s second largest information technology company (by revenue) and the leading vendor of U.S. smartphones, Apple has the potential to impact consumer health behavior through adoption of their healthcare products.

Expected to be announced on September 9, 2014 as part of their new iPhone operating system iOS 8, the new Healthkit app is aimed at creating a data repository or dashboard to track health and fitness vitals, emergency contacts, food intake and other bodily failures/successes – these include heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, cholesterol, sleep, blood type, allergies and other emergency information, for example.

Given Apple’s market share leverage and the potential of health and fitness apps to facilitate data sharing of health information (e.g. blood pressure readings, nutrition information) with doctors, healthcare apps like Healthkit may represent a new medium for electronic health record storage and data sharing driven by consumers.