In a recent note, I discussed how Apple was sponsoring the MIPACT study at the University of Michigan involving the use of Apple Watches + iPhones and home health monitoring (see: MIPACT Study Sponsored by Apple Provides a Preview of Home Health Monitoring). A recent article predicts that healthcare will be a major source of revenue for Apple in the future (see: Health care is one of Apple's most lucrative opportunities). Below is an excerpt from the article:
Apple's opportunity in health care is so large with the Apple Watch that the company should soon generate tens of billions of dollars a year in annual revenue from wearables and health services. It's a nascent space for Apple and hard to predict how much money the company will make from health services as it potentially dives deeper into monitoring features such as blood glucose and blood pressure....Apple has a few key advantages over its technology rivals, including Alphabet and Microsoft, as it looks to move into the medical market and attack the $3.5 trillion health-care industry....Apple was able to recruit 400,000 people in less than a year for its Apple Watch heart health study with Stanford University, suggesting that people are willing to share their medical information with Apple. Beyond consumer device sales, the company has started to sign deals with health insurers who are willing to pay for some portion of the Apple Watch on behalf of their members. Apple has already inked that type of partnership with Aetna (see: Wearable Health Monitoring Devices: a Means to Lower Insurance Costs?). It's also currently in talks with private Medicare plans, which could mean increased access to the Apple Watch for seniors....The company also has revenue potential in the electronic medical records market. IPhone users will have access to the Apple's health app, which allows customers to pull together medical information from dozens of hospitals and clinics (see: Apple Has Plans to Copy EHR Records to iPhones and Apple Watches). In its current form, the feature is designed for consumers, because it's a huge challenge for people to aggregate their lab reports, immunization records and more. Morgan Stanley said it could turn into a real business if Apple starts pulling together data and selling reports to health systems.
As the article suggests, Apple has launched various projects that will provide the company with broad access to anonymized patient EHR records. Such access is being developed as a result of various research projects and also through its program to download EHR records to iPhones (see: Big Tech Is Knocking on Hospital Doors; It's All About the Data). The value of these records for Apple is that they can be the basis for the development of four types of analytics research: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive (see: 4 types of data analytics to improve decision-making). Descriptive analytics provides information about what has already happened to a patient, diagnostic analytics provides the root cause of what has happened, predictive analytics predicts what will happen in the future, and prescriptive analytics goes beyond predictive analytics by specifying both the actions necessary to achieve predicted outcomes and the interrelated effects of each decision.
Much of the important data contained in EHRs is in the form of natural language which can be understood by natural language processing (NLP). This is the subfield of computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. In particular, it addresses how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data (see: Natural language processing). I have posted a number of previous notes about NLP (see, for example: Assessing Drugs Using "Real World Evidence" in Addition to Clinical Trials; AI Allows Computers to "Read" EHR Records and Make Predictions; Amazon Launches New Medical Record Language Processing Service). Apple will require substantial expertise in NLP in order to make some sense of much of the data it is acquiring via access to EHRs but this should not be that much of a challenge for Apple given its earnings and technical reputation.
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