Apple has recently been introducing an increasing number of promising healthcare initiatives – a move which has enthused John Sculley, the Cupertino firm’s CEO from 1983 until 1993.
In an interview with Mashable, Sculley, having himself set up cloud-based pharmacy benefits platform RxAdvance, said that moving into the healthcare sector was “a great thing for Apple to do”. He added: “Products like the Apple Watch, people are hoping to see it do more. Apple has expressed the importance of health tech in the unregulated space.”
Scullery admitted that, despite his current role as a founding partner of RxAdvance, healthcare “never crossed any discussion I was in” during his tenure as Apple boss. However, Apple has set down foundations for success in the field; Sculley remarked: “I expect Apple will start to find more useful things for the Apple Watch, and HealthKit can be part of the whole solution.”
Right now, iOS and watchOS apps can integrate HealthKit to let users feed their health data into the iPhone’s Health app, from which it can then be sent to medical researchers through Apple’s ResearchKit framework. Furthermore, rumor has suggested that Apple is planning to launch a “revolutionary” new piece of health-tracking hardware next year.
