【Arnold Reyes Archives】

Apple's app platform has been quietly growing in popularity in U.S. hospitals. Now,Arnold Reyes Archives the public is getting a look at one of the first apps to be used in a major hospital.

HomeHero, a company that provides non-medical home care, is now using a new app created through Apple's CareKit platform in partnership with Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The app will be used to help patients at one of the country's largest nonprofit academic medical centers readjust to life at home after a hospital stay.

The app was developed through CareKit, Apple's open-source platform that allows researchers and care practitioners in the medical field to develop apps tailored to their needs without any coding knowledge.

Caregivers who care for patients through HomeHero will use the app to keep track of their work and communicate with their company. Like the app Uber uses to communicate with its drivers, it's publicly available but hidden from the app store.

"CareKit is early in its use, and it's much to HomeHero's credit they're the first of our partners to be leveraging it," Cedars-Sinai Chief Information Officer Darren Dworkin told Mashable. "It's the right thing to do as a health system, to enable patients to get information through commonly available platforms, as well as an area for growth. There will be other partners that seek out CareKit."

CareKit launched in March as an open source framework to help people track their care plans, symptoms, the progress of treatments and communication with doctors. It joined ResearchKit, a similar platform for apps related to medical research.

“We believe that giving individuals the tools to understand what is happening with their health is incredibly powerful, and apps designed using CareKit make this a reality by empowering people to take a more active role in their care," Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams said in a statement at the time.

The framework is useful for hospitals and others in the health field who don't have the capacity to build their own apps from scratch.

Surgical departments, for example, create care checklists for before and after surgery, while other patients get tailored care information through a CareKit app following a diagnosis.

Other hospitals — including the Texas Medical Center in Houston and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston — have more quietly used CareKit on site. HomeHero's program at Cedars-Sinai is the first to publicly launch through a hospital partnership.

Apple isn't sharing any numbers around CareKit, but the ResearchKit framework that preceded CareKit drew 100,000 apps in its first three months — a lot for the medical field.

With caregiving apps like HomeHero and hospitals like Cedars-Sinai coming to rely on Apple for their own work, the framework is certainly helping Apple entrench itself further in the health field.

Apple this week announced it would partner with the health insurer Aetna to offer subsidized Apple Watches to Aetna customers, another move to enter the multi-billion-dollar health market.