Business Insider Intelligence - repost - Digital Health Briefing Iphone Research Kit

DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING

Apple builds out iPhone as a clinical tool — China's largest insurer touts digital health as the future — Automated claims present $11 billion savings opportunity - CLONE Nicky Lineaweaver | June 18, 2018 Good morning! DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING is delivered first thing every morning exclusively to Business Insider Intelligence members and BRIEFING subscribers. Have feedback? We'd like to hear from you. Write me at: lbeaver@businessinsider.com APPLE TRANSFORMS IPHONE INTO CLINICAL-GRADE TOOL WITH RESEARCHKIT UPDATES: A host of new functions in Apple’s ResearchKit 2.0 update point to an iPhone that could serve as a digital medical assistant. The new version of ResearchKit — Apple’s developer framework that allows researchers to build and maintain apps that track health data — includes features that can collect data from speech, hearing, and vision tests. The latest updates are a part of Apple’s efforts to turn the iPhone and Apple Watch into invaluable devices for the medical community. For the healthcare community, the ResearchKit framework presents an opportunity to greatly improve clinical trial participation and, therefore, the validity of the results.Developing new treatments is an expensive and lengthy process, with a high failure rate. The average development time for a new drug is 12 years and costs in excess of $2.5 billion, for example. Further, around 90% of medicines in human studies fail. Apps using ResearchKit could help to reduce barriers for participants by adapting the design of clinical trials to suit the daily routine of patients, leading to a more nuanced understanding of the disease being tested and potentially higher success rates in medical studies. One of the biggest benefits of ResearchKit is that mobile apps can provide more accurate data for clinical studies. Typically, patients in clinical trials have to self-report historical health data over a specific time in a diary. However, self-reporting has not been an effective way to track events like seizures — for example, over 40% of generalized tonic-clonic seizures are not reported by patients. Apps built using ResearchKit can more effectively track events during clinical studies. As Apple expands the capabilities of ResearchKit, it opens the door for a wider variety of experiments to be run, further entrenching the company within the healthcare landscape. For example, in April 2018, pharma giant Novartis launched a new product on Apple’s ResearchKit platform to validate whether iPhones could be used in eye studies. The company hopes the offering will broaden its reach of participants, increasing the validity of the clinical trial. TOP CHINESE INSURER TOUTS DIGITAL HEALTH ECOSYSTEM AS WAY OF THE FUTURE: China-based Ping An Group, one of the largest insurers in the world, views an ecosystem of digital services as integral to the company’s vision of health, CIO Jonathan Larsen told digital health hub StartUp Health last week. Ping An is looking to expand its telemedicine platform, Ping An Good Doctor, beyond the 192 million registered users it currently serves into new international markets. The company’s also looking at how investing in new tech can add value to its services — like mobile health (mHealth) services that put more patient data in the hands of its telemedicine providers, and AI-enabled diagnostic imaging for use in Ping An clinics. Expanding these digital offerings could help attract more patients to Ping An's services. Moreover, offering patients more digital tools means Ping An can potentially capture more patient data, which it can use to encourage health-improving behaviors that help to cut reimbursement costs.