Apple’s EKG app stands out in a maze of health technologies for its ability to monitor a user’s heart function around the clock from any location, generating a stream of data that could personalize cardiology care and lead to the development of more effective treatments.
But for Apple itself, the business impact is potentially even more far-reaching. It gives America’s dominant maker of consumer technologies a giant head start in the exploding market for patient monitoring devices — a field that could upend the way care is delivered not just in cardiology, but in countless other specialties as well.
Health care specialists who follow Apple said the company has spent years preparing to seize this opportunity. It burst on the health scene in early 2015, when the company launched ResearchKit to turn the iPhone into a tool for conducting faster, cheaper, and larger studies on patients with various conditions. Now, products such as the EKG app promise to go further, giving patients and doctors new streams of physiological data that can be collected at any time.
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