HealthKit medical trials to launch at Stanford University Hospital and Duke University

Healthkit

When Apple announced latest iPhones, it also mentioned the trials of its HealthKit platform though no details were provided at that time.

Stanford University Hospital’s physicians will use Apple’s tech to track blood sugar levels for children with Type 1 diabetes.According to Reuters, Cook & Co. managed to corner two prominent U.S. hospitals which are preparing to launch pilots with diabetics and chronic disease patients using Apple’s health platform.

Stanford University Hospital is one of those hospitals, and its physicians will use Apple’s tech to track blood sugar levels for children with Type 1 diabetes. Under the deal, select young patients will be sent home with an iPod touch to monitor blood sugar levels between doctor’s visits.

The other Apple partner is Duke University, which wants to track blood pressure, weight and other measurements for patients with cancer or heart disease.

Duke University’s Ricky Bloomfield, an internal medicine pediatrician and director of mobile strategy, hopes the pilot will help doctors access the data they need to better monitor sick patients living at home.

The goal of both pilots is to improve the accuracy and speed of reporting data.“This could eliminate the hassle of getting data from patients, who want to give it to us,” he said. “HealthKit removes some of the error from patients’ manually entering their data.”

The goal of both pilots is to improve the accuracy and speed of reporting data, and offer additional capabilities like warning patients of an impending problem. The pilot programs will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

HealthKit acts like a link between measuring devices and medical information services relied on by doctors, such as Epic Systems Corp, a partner already announced by Apple. Going forward, the iPhone maker will eventually work with other companies from the health space all of which may want to tune into the HealthKit platform.