An interesting and nuanced analysis of the possible impact of HealthKit for doctors.

I will propose a more mundane and broad analysis: HealthKit won’t matter.

Doctors won’t trust the data and won’t know what to do with most of it. Additionally, the data will remain siloed within patient’s phones despite high-profile partnerships with EMR companies because most physicians don’t use those EMRs and even those that do often run outdated versions.

The current pursuit is novel ways to collect data. Apple has taken the next step and is trying to collate and organize it. However, the crucial step—one that will require research [1]—is making sense of the data and providing actual guidance. So far, nobody seems to be taking this step (at least not at scale).

Yes, research (!), that long and nasty process of trying to understand something. ↩