CareKit, Apple’s software framework which better enables health professionals to provide care for patients via iPhone, has attracted praise from Thomas Goetz, the CEO and co-founder of Iodine. His company has developed Start – the first CareKit app to be clinically integrated for treating mental health.
While, globally, depression affects over 350 million people, it remains a very difficult condition to treat. However, in an interview for Computerworld, Goetz calls CareKit “terrific” for leading developers to focus more on the user experience of patients and doctors using iPhone apps for treatment.
He added that CareKit, which Apple first announced in March, “really created an intuitive framework for connecting patient-reported data to the clinical care setting”. Start itself aims to reduce the time between depression diagnosis and identification of the best-suited medication.
Treating depression can be a very time-consuming endeavor due to the large amount of trial and error involved, as no one single type of treatment works for all sufferers. However, these sufferers with iPhones can help to relieve their depression by downloading the free Start app.
