Tim Cook is on record as saying Apple will be known for its advancements in health. Today we see what steps they've taken.
Today in health, it apple health from the worldwide developer conference. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff, current and engaged. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance.
Canon medical and current health. Check them out at this week. health.com/today. All right. Just got done, watching a portion of the keynote address from the apple worldwide developer conference. Lot of interesting things, some new, , Mac books, some new iPad features, but really this is a software conference. So you get to hear about.
, watch O S and iOS and some of the other. , advancements in the API APIs and whatnot that apple is, is working with. Well, I'm going to focus on today is the. The health app, the health features that are associated with the iOS. And so they had a handful of things to talk about there. The first is sleep.
So, as you know, you can track your sleep with your apple watch. And with watch oh, S. Nine, they now introduce something called sleep stages. And what they're doing is they're taking information from the accelerometer and the heart rate sensor, and they are determining which stage of sleep you are in. They've used machine learning models. They've taken tons of information over the years.
And they've trained it to identify sleep stages along the way. And it gives you really cool graphics on that and determines how often you cycle through them and whatnot. It will tell you how much time. You spend in each stage and the amount of time you wake up and all those things. , apple, heart and movement study participants can also add even more data to that research and train the machine learning algorithm even further. So, , an opportunity to get some real, detailed statistics on your sleep. And we all know how important sleep is.
To your health. So that's an incremental improvement on that. , heart health is also something that apple has been very focused in on. They had the Alert that you could get on your apple watch that it would determine if you were in a fib. They now want to work with you. If you have been diagnosed with a fib.
And they now have an AFib alert tracker. And in that is in watchOS nine and it can track the amount of time your heart spends in a fib. And it gives you some really cool graphical depictions of your AFib history time of day. Those kinds of things. And you can also share a PDF with your doctor to facilitate conversation so you can expect some people coming in with some apple graphics.
To your doctors to have those conversations. So something. To get up to speed on and, , get in front of this is not completely FDA approved. The FDA approval will be coming soon. They didn't give an exact date on that, but just want to make you aware that that's not a FDA approved function just yet.
, I think two of the biggest announcements to me, one was medication tracking. So you can now track manage and, , look at some really fascinating things amongst drugs, including drug, drug interactions. As with all apple health apps and apple apps in general, they talked a lot about security and privacy. So your medication history is. , protected within the apps. And specifically around medications, they have notifications for taking the medications and that's a pretty neat feature in and of itself.
, track manage and even, , have alerts on your apple watch. You can take a picture of the label of the medication to input the med. Then I think probably one of the most interesting things to me was the drug drug interactions. Right. This used to be the purview of some pretty sophisticated software that we utilized in the health systems.
And now apple has partnered with Elsevier for evidence-based. , Drug drug interactions and they will give you an alert. And they will look at critical, moderate, and severe. , interactions as well as interactions with alcohol and other things and provide you that information. I think we can also expect that that information will find its way back.
, within our health system, in conversations with patients and our doctors. So again, probably something worth getting in front of and being the source of that information to. The doctors that that is coming their way. , the final thing I found of interest was a health sharing. And this is pretty exciting. You can actually do an invitation to a family member to share, , information with them from your apple health.
Record and keep in mind that apple health. Is connected to a lot of medical records through epic and other, , interactions with EHR. That are out there. And there's an awful lot of health systems that have signed up for this. And so there's an opportunity to, , participate in the caring of loved ones, even from a far.
And to look at the medications, the alerts, the drug drug interactions to help. The loved one to navigate their own health. So a lot of movement here really appreciate the things that apple is doing in the area of health.
So what's my, so what here, if you remember back in the day, Tim cook said that apple will be known for its movement in healthcare and the progress they are making is, , greatly appreciated. I like where they're going.
I liked the drug, drug interactions. I liked the health sharing. , there's a lot of progress being made here. I would like to see them really move the needle forward. And a handful of areas. That I've talked about in the past that I didn't really see here, but I would like to see them really start to focus on.
The experience, the experience of managing your health and the experience of the interaction between the health system. And the patient, I think there's an opportunity. Here for them to really streamline the intake process. I think there's an opportunity here for. Apple to step into the information sharing
and to have patient centric interoperability. Really be driven from within the apple health record. So I think there's a couple of things here that, , I, I, again, I really appreciate the things that apple is doing, but I would like to see them to push. This envelope a little bit further. All right. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.
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