Apple has announced a new product that has health techno’s abuzz. It could revolutionize health care diagnosis and treatment.

By Shekhar Sharad. This excerpt is from the author’s original LinkedIn article.

Lets say that a person has a blood pressure condition and has to ensure that their pressure is maintained at a certain prescribed level.

The doctor has also advised the person to get at least 30 minutes of moderate physical exercise, and ensure they sleep at least 8 hours at night.

The ideal answer for the person would be that there is one device that they can buy that can monitor all of these different conditions — however, the more likely scenario is that person will end up acquiring one or two devices to monitor all of the different conditions.

Now, instead of being able to use one company’s app to monitor all conditions, the user has to rely on two different company apps or as we see now for both iOS and Android, apps that consolidate information from different devices. One example is myFitnessPal. So you could say that this problem has already been solved. Agreed. But this is only half the problem – the other half is the more critical piece of the puzzle – not just tracking, but actually providing diagnosis and/or treatment

Not merely tracking, but diagnosing & treating

The other issue that the wearables market faces is that while there is enormous amounts of data that is collected per human being, it remains on their smartphone and never goes anywhere except for bragging rights with friends and family – “Look at how many steps I took today” or “See honey, I have been maintaining my blood sugar even though I had the Creme Brulee”.

From a purely medical perspective, the treasure trove of data that is available through these different wearables is mind-boggling. Collectively these data points will give a lot of insight into the health of our community as a whole, but even from an individual perspective, the constant automatic monitoring of our health can give a doctor a lot of great information that they can use to keep us in great health.

But until now, there was not an effective way to do this. All of that changed when Apple announced the Health App and the HealthKit.

The Health App – why is it key to Apple’s long term growth?

From my perspective, Apple should/would/probably has one and only one goal – that is to equip every single person in this world with an iOS device.

But this is a lofty goal. To achieve this goal, they have to find areas that are indispensable to us as human beings.

Music is dispensable. Videos and games are dispensable. The smartphone is dispensable. However, our health is indispensable.

And Apple saw an opportunity here – while there are several gadgets to track vitals – there was no infrastructure that helped connect them together and more importantly, no system for doctors to monitor the data collected by these gadgets and provide real-time diagnosis/treatment.

The Health app does exactly that. Not only does it provide a common, single interface to connect all of your wearable devices, it is able to provide this data with various levels of built-in privacy to doctors and nurses who in turn can monitor your every action and habit (nope that creme brulee will trigger a call from your doc, so dont do it)

Lets go back to the previous example: Now the person can still buy different wearable devices, but they can all be monitored from one application, and in turn, if you authorize your clinic, your vitals or conditions can be tracked and appropriate treatment or actions be taken immediately without waiting for a visit to the docs office.

This is revolutionary.

Consider a more extreme case – a 60+ year old person who is in danger of stroke doesn’t have to worry about trying to alert someone if something fatal were to happen to them. An app such as the Health App can automatically detect signs and alert the nearby ambulance service (I’m envisioning a cloud enabled service for a small fee that would connect emergency services and those requiring it). The possibilities are endless.

Read the complete original article.