Apple released a report on Wednesday that explains its two-pronged strategy in the digital health market. On the one hand, it wants to attract customers with health and fitness features, and on the other, it wants to work with traditional healthcare systems.
The report was led by Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams. It is the first time that Apple has given a full picture of how it works in the healthcare market in the eight years since it started putting health features on iPhones, like a way to store medical records. It has also started working with places like the Stanford University School of Medicine to do formal medical studies on a large scale.
A lot of the work has been done on the Apple Watch. Williams was a big part of bringing this device to market, and it has sensors for heart health and other things.
In the report, Apple said that its main goal for customers is to give them a safe place to store their health and medical information on their iPhones and to use tools like the Apple Watch to warn and encourage people to take better care of their health. The device can tell someone if their heartbeat isn’t normal and can also tell an emergency contact if someone falls hard. Apple said that its system can now store 150 different kinds of encrypted health data that only users can access and not Apple.
The company also talked about the work it is doing with medical researchers to let them use Apple devices to do studies and to let patients share and talk about data collected by Apple devices so they can keep a better eye on their health between visits to the doctor.
Williams wrote in the report that Apple plans to keep making health-related features for both users and the healthcare industry.
“Our vision for the future is to keep making science-based technology that gives people even more information and acts as an intelligent guardian of their health,” Williams wrote. “This way, they won’t just be passengers on their own health journey.”
