Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has turned on access to HeathKit data for more than 80,000 patients, the largest integration yet for Apple’s move into the health industry, Bloomberg reports. Patients can now allow Cedars-Sinai’s My CS-Link app to access HealthKit’s monitoring of weight, blood pressure, glucose levels, steps taken and many other kinds of data, passing that information along to the patient’s doctors. How that information will be used in diagnosis and treatment is still up for debate, Darren Dworkin, chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai, said in an interview.
“This is just another set of data that we’re confident our physicians will take into account as they make clinical and medical judgments,” Dworkin said. “We don’t really, fully know and understand how patients will want to use this and we’re going to basically stand ready to learn by what will happen.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook touted the company’s high hopes for use of HealthKit data by doctors during a conference in February, but was careful to point out that all sharing of HealthKit data would be at the patient’s discretion. My CS-Link users will have to manually select which HealthKit data is reported to the hospital, a process detailed on Cedars-Sinai’s instruction page for use of wearable devices.
While HealthKit collects a massive amount of information about users, only the data that users specifically select will be reported automatically to the hospital. Aside from setting up the configuration for HealthKit to let My CS-Link to access specific data, the hospital won’t require any added patient consent beyond the general My CS-Link sign-up process. “Rather than turn it on as sort of an opt-in, we’ve basically enabled it for all of our patients,” Dworkin told Bloomberg.
