Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has had considerable success with a strategy of incorporating fitness and health tracking into its products. The Apple Watch, for example and its HealthKit platform. However, a report from CNBC says Apple is hard at work on an iPhone medical hub — making the big leap to becoming the repository of an owner’s complete medical records and information.
The move would make the iPhone the go-between that ensures patients, doctors and medical facilities are able to access and share medical data for improved healthcare.
If successful, the move would be huge for Apple stock, with a must-have feature that’s practically guaranteed to drive iPhone sales.
CNBC Says Apple Working to Create iPhone Medical Hub
CNBC published a report last week claiming that Apple is working with hospitals and medical professionals on an ambitious health initiative that would store all of a patient’s health information on their iPhone.
That’s not just the activity data captured by various fitness trackers and sensors. This iPhone medical hub (or what CNBC has described as iTunes for health) would become a central repository for everything: lab test results, prescriptions, doctor visits and records about conditions, such as allergies.
The data would all be digital and critically, it would be shareable between medical services. So a doctor would instantly have access to all a patient’s lab results, or if the patient were to seek emergency care their entire medical background would be immediately available and in one location.
Today, CNBC published a report that Apple is working with a startup called Health Gorilla. Neither company would comment on the story, but given Health Gorilla’s work on sharing medical records between health practitioners, it would support that idea that Apple is planning to create an iPhone medical hub.
An Increasingly Health-Conscious, Aging Population
During its initial boom in popularity, iPhone sales were largely driven by a young and tech-embracing population. By developing an iPhone medical hub, Apple could drive the next phase of growth, tapping into a growing market of senior citizens.
The number of U.S. seniors is projected to double by 2050 as the baby boomers age. At that point, there are expected to be nearly 84 million Americans age 65 and older. Seniors require more medical care than younger generations.
This will put pressure on programs like Medicare to find ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. At the same time, many seniors are embracing technology like smartphones and are increasingly proactive about their health.
If AAPL is able to make an iPhone medical hub work — incorporating fitness data with medical records and making all of that data easily accessible to patients and medical professionals — it’s positioning the iPhone to be a key player.
The iPhone could drive improved medical efficiencies, as well as being the always-there device that helps seniors actively manage their health.
That could pay off in another huge wave of iPhone sales. More importantly for AAPL, the iPhone would have a killer app that keeps people buying it, even in a mature smartphone market.
Will Apple’s efforts come to fruition for AAPL stock? As CNBC points out, other tech giants have tried and failed to crack the digital patient health record business. Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) stumbled with Google Health, for example.
However, Apple is tying its ambitions to the iPhone — the most popular smartphone in the U.S. — and in the years since Google Health, fitness and activity tracking have taken off with consumers.
Apple is also working on other medical-related devices like an Apple Watch with a built-in blood glucose meter. At the same time, the FDA has just announced an initiative to streamline the approval process for consumer tech with medical applications.
The combination of easily accessible health record storage, wellness and fitness apps, and hardware like the Apple Watch that can actively feed data into this ecosystem would be unprecedented.
In other words, the stars may be aligning for AAPL to make a play for making the iPhone central to future healthcare.
As of this writing, Brad Moon did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
