Apple's iPhone 6 won't be available until Friday, but the iPhone's new operating system — iOS 8 — will be released on Wednesday.
That means Apple's signature new health software, HealthKit, is just hours away. And Christina Farr's exclusive report for Reuters — that Stanford University Hospital and Duke University are preparing new clinical trials, using Apple's HealthKit and iPhones to track patients' blood sugar levels and other measurements — got both Apple fans and health care industry watchers in a tizzy on Monday.
"HealthKit is already helping top hospitals fight cancer, diabetes," Cult of Mac breathlessly reported.
Here's a reality check: It isn't.
Stanford has just two patients in its clinical trial. Duke may not even have one; the hospital hasn't shared any information yet.
Sure, HealthKit could be transformative for hospitals and patients, especially if the iPhone 6 is adopted at scale. (And it certainly seems like the iPhone 6 will be; as Brian Solomon reports for Forbes, Apple says there were a record-breaking 4 million iPhone 6 pre-orders.) It could drive awareness of fitness apps and help fuel better doctor-patient conversations.
Also See: One-Third Of Doctors Might Buy iPhone 6 By Thanksgiving
And more hospitals and doctors are perched to release new health apps in the coming days, taking advantage of the HealthKit platform's ability to potentially aggregate data from iPhones and other devices and send it straight to patients' medical charts.
Also See: Apple-Mayo Clinic Partnership Could Be Smart Medicine
But just as an unsustainable hype cycle built for Apple Watch, there are mounting expectations and wild claims that Apple's new iPhone 6 — with new fitness monitoring and built-in sensors — will speedily drive a transformation in health care delivery.
"I believe what Apple is doing is one of three main drivers that will move health insurance from being employer based to consumer based," Joe Markland blogs at Employee Benefit News. "This may forever change the way health care is financed and delivered."
Keep in mind that remote monitoring isn't anything new. Hospitals have tried to use text messaging, for instance, to check in and collect data from diabetes patients for more than a decade.
But HealthKit could transform the current model of health care data collection and transfer. In previous efforts to remotely monitor patients, some of that data got lost because of the imperfect hand-off and coordination process.
That would change if the iPhone emerges as the catch-all platform for all health data tracking — and sends the findings directly into a patient's medical record, thanks to Apple's partnership with Epic Healthcare, the nation's leading provider of electronic medical records.
"This could eliminate the hassle of getting data from patients, who want to give it to us," Duke's Ricky Bloomfield, a pediatrician and director of mobile strategy, told Reuters.
"HealthKit removes some of the error from patients' manually entering their data."
Still, what's telling about the Reuters report is just how early we are in the HealthKit adoption cycle.
Two hospital pilots are just a sample of HealthKit's nominal range of capabilities. And two patients does not a health care revolution make.
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