Cerner Wellness Integrates with Apple’s HealthKit

When Apple announced HealthKit, they announced a few healthcare partners including Epic. Many thought this was an interesting announcement, but I was (and still am) skeptical that anything really meaningful will come. As one person put it, we’re suppose to be excited that two of the most closed companies in the world are working together?

I recently saw the news come out that Epic’s main competitor, Cerner, announced that they’d integrated with Apple’s HealthKit. In fact, I believe their integration seems to have come out before Epic’s integration (unless I missed it, or maybe Epic just likes to keep quiet). Here’s a short excerpt from the Cerner announcement:

To me, HealthKit is about making it more convenient to manage your health and wellness, and share that information with the people that are helping you reach your goals. It’s less about trying to get real-time clinical insights or make new diagnoses. HealthyNow has the features that consumers and wellness experts are looking for in these apps, and by integrating with HealthKit, we’ve opened up the experience to a whole array of health apps for our members to choose from. This integration enables the feeding of key health metrics into our platform for sharing with health coaches, earning of incentive points, and identification of new opportunities to improve your health. By promoting healthier habits, consumers lower their premiums, health plans reduce their spend on treating avoidable diseases, and everyone lives a healthier life. (emphasis added)

The details on what Apple’s HealthKit would really do have been pretty foggy. Although, this paragraph illustrates where I figured HealthKit was going. Notice the part of the quote where I added emphasis. Cerner is just looking to suck data from HealthKit into Cerner. Maybe they have future plans to make Cerner data available to HealthKit, but the announcement seems to say they haven’t done so yet. This one way interface is exactly why I’m skeptical that HealthKit will really have a huge impact on healthcare.

What do you think? Have any of you integrated with HealthKit? I’d love to see if you have other views of where HealthKit might be headed.

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October 1, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Apple  Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:  Cerner    HealthKit

Aetna Shuts Down CarePass – What’s It Mean?

Looks like MobiHealthNews was the first to break the story that Aetna had chose to shutdown their CarePass product. This is big news since CarePass was Aetna’s baby and calling card in the mobile health world. They had a lot riding on it. Although, I think that iTriage, which Aetna acquired, was certainly the most used app under their umbrella.

If you’ve been on the mobile health/mHealth conference circuits you know that Aetna has been everywhere. Plus, the CEO of Aetna was even a keynote speaker at HIMSS (makes you wonder how much they paid for that spot). Without their CarePass product I’ll be interested to see what Aetna does in this space. Will they basically pull out almost completely?

Sure, Aetna will always take part in some way or another, but will they be pumping money into it like they’d been doing for a while now? I don’t think they will. I think we’ll see Aetna take a backseat approach to the IT part of the industry and just hop on board other people’s work like they did with iTriage.

Another piece of the MobiHealthNews article mentioned above that really intrigued me is this:

The company found no shortage of willing partners to feed data into the app. Over the two years of its existence, CarePass interfaced with MapMyFitness, LoseIt, RunKeeper, Fooducate, Jawbone, Fitbit, fatsecret, Withings, breathresearch (makers of MyBreath), Zipongo, BodyMedia, Active, Goodchime!, MoxieFit, Passage, FitSync, FitBug, BettrLife, Thryve, SparkPeople, HealthSpark, NetPulse, Earndit, FoodEssentials, Personal.com, Healthline, GoodRx, GymPact, Pilljogger, mHealthCoach, Care4Today, and meQuilibrium.

I think there’s a lesson here when it comes to API integrations. Who would have guessed that after making such a huge investment in CarePass, Aetna would just close up shop? I’m quite sure none of these companies that integrated with CarePass’ API thought CarePass would be gone. These types of integrations can be very time consuming and now all that effort is down the drain.

Although, the bigger lesson here is that just because you integrate a bunch of data from other applications doesn’t mean your app is going to be a success. It’s what you do with the data that’s integrated that matters. That’s why I’m really skeptical about Apple Health and HealthKit. Getting the data is one thing. Making that data useful is something very different.

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August 27, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:Aetna  CarePass  CarePass API  iTriage  MobiHealthNews

Apple Health and HealthKit – I’m Extremely Skeptical

Everyone is buzzing over the latest announcement from Apple at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that an Apple Health app and HealthKit (for healthcare developers) will be included in the latest iOS release (iOS8). The announcement was a little weak for me because it had already been leaked that the announcement was coming and also because the details of what it will do are really glossed over.

Whenever I hear an announcement without many details I start to wonder if it’s just vaporware right now. I think it is in this case. Instead of Apple offering a healthcare product that they know people need and will use, it feels like they’ve seen the growth of the health tracker and wearables market and they’re just throwing something out there to see if it works.

This HuffPo article compared the Apple HealthKit to what Apple did in iTunes. That’s so out of touch with the reality of healthcare apps. Music is a simple thing (not the rights part, but the usage part) that everyone understands. If you give them the music, then the consumer can go to town with it. Health data is much more complex.

The reality of health data is that it often has little value without some sort of outside expert analysis. This becomes even more important when you start mixing multiple sources of data into one interface like Apple will be doing with HealthKit. Sure, if Apple was focused on making all of the data they collected from all these third parties into smart, actionable data, then I’d be really excited. However, they’re not doing this at all. They’re just going to be a dumb platform that anyone can connect to and the smartest thing it will do is send you a notification. However, the outside application will have to prompt it to even do that.

I don’t think that Apple HealthKit is all bad. Maybe it will make it easier for developers to code their application once and then be able to connect their application to any blood pressure cuff out there. If they can do that, it would provide a lot of value to entrepreneurs in the space. However, it won’t transform health as we know it the way some people are describing it.

I also love people propping up the names of the Mayo Clinic and Epic. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault had some similar names as well. How are they doing? A name doesn’t mean you’ll get a result.

The Epic name is interesting. However, I’m not very confident that bringing one closed garden together with another closed garden is really going to produce a lot of results. I’ll get back to you when I actually see them announce what they’re really doing together. Until then, this just feels like Epic and Apple had dinner together and said that it would be great if they could work together. If they had more, they sure didn’t talk about it on stage. So, I’m skeptical of what will really come out of the partnership.

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June 4, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Apple  Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Killer NPI API – BloomAPI

The foundation of many mobile physician applications is some sort of NPI lookup. In many ways, the NPI is the social security number for clinicians. It’s a unique identifier for a clinician and pretty much all of them have one. The good part is that the NPI data is downloadable for those who want to use it. Here’s Michael Wasser’s description of the NPI data:

The NPI is downloadable and is made up of basic demographics (name, sex), location information (business address, practice address), affiliations, and details of their practice (taxonomy codes). It is maintained by Cognosante for the federal government. Weekly disseminations are available at http://nppes.viva-it.com/NPI_Files.html. The total size of the NPI is about 4.5 Gigabytes.

The problem: The data isn’t huge, but its too big for excel or to just casually include in an application.

Like any good hacker, Michael Wasser saw this problem and decided to create a solution. That solution is called the BloomAPI (see also the github repository). I think this NPI lookup tool is a really great offering to the healthcare IT community. I’m sure we’ll see many applications use this going forward.

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September 18, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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Jawbone Acquires BodyMedia and Launches Partner API

Today it was announced that Jawbone has acquired BodyMedia. Here’s an excerpt on the acquisition and announcement from pandydaily.

Today Jawbone, the company that makes the wearable “quantified self” band UP, issued two announcements: it’s rolling out an API so the device can integrate with other apps and connected devices relating to health and wellness. It’s also acquiring BodyMedia, which makes an FDA-approved weight-loss device called FIT that’s been used on the TV show “The Biggest Loser.”
…
The BodyMedia acquisition is a talent and intellectual property grab – it has 87 patents in its IP portfolio – but it will retain its name, continue producing the FIT, and keep its office in Pittsburgh open. The company would not disclose any other terms of the sale. The acquisition is a smart move in building out the product’s abilities in the future. BodyMedia has a medical bent, so surely future iterations of UP will pay more attention to things like disease monitoring.

But the really intriguing news is the API. It will allow partner apps to be able to tap into a user’s Jawbone data so she can find out more about her health and wellness habits. For example, a user can log onto MapMyFitness and view workout data in UP. Or he can step on a Withing scale – another connected device – and import his weight into up and see it in the context of sleeping and eating habits.

I think the article is right that the biggest asset that Jawbone is acquiring is the patent portfolio of BodyMedia. The other hard part is that I think the BodyMedia brand is better known than the Jawbone brand. So, the company will have a tough decision in how to go forward. It will take some time for them to work through the existing inventories and merge the product lines. It will be fun to watch.

I find the Jawbone API a little disappointing since it’s just a partner API. I know they say their intent is to eventually open up the Jawbone data to anyone, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t do this from the start.

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April 30, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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FitBit API and Other Healthcare APIs

I’ve long been a big fan of APIs in technology. It’s really powerful to open up your software so that outside developers can create really cool applications on top of your software. Think where Twitter would be today if it weren’t for their API. Most of the best Twitter clients were not built by Twitter. That’s just one simple example.

With that in mind, I was interested to see how the FitBit API was doing in its development. It’s been around for a couple years, so my hope was that I’d find a mature API with some good documentation and most importantly a strong developer community around it.

It seems like Fitbit has made it really easy to sign up and start using their API. That’s a good thing. Far too many in healthcare have an API, but they put up these enormous barriers for developers to start using it. When you’re dealing with PHI, you do have to take a serious approach to access, but the intent should be to create as many of those trusted API relationships as possible.

Next, I took a look at the Fitbit API documentation. Most of you won’t want to look at the API documentation since you’re not a developer. However, if you look at this Fitbit API Explorer page, you’ll get a good view of what functions are possible with the Fitbit API. They have a set of Ruby, PHP, and .Net Client libraries which is great (Although they’re not directly developed or supported by Fitbit). I do wish they had a really good sample app that uses their API. I’ve found a great sample application is incredibly valuable to developers that want to start using that API.

Finally, I took a look at the . I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more activity here. It does seem that the questions in the group do get eventually answered, but I’d have like to see a bigger Fitbit presence in the forum. The most active threads are the feature requests and announcements threads which isn’t too much of a surprise. There were only 15-20 active threads in April.

All in all, it looks like Fitbit has created a pretty solid API. I could see myself using it for a future project.

I’m interested to know what other APIs you’ve found in healthcare. What other healthcare companies are putting out really good APIs? Have you used the Fitbit API? What was your experience? Is it reliable? What are the best apps in healthcare that leverage someone’s API?

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April 12, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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