Like most people who attended Apple’s event on Monday, I was waiting for news of the Apple Watch, but I was distracted early on by another, incredibly important announcement: ResearchKit.

ResearchKit is a software framework that allows doctors and researchers to gather data more frequently and accurately than ever before.  The software development framework is a crucial component of the entire process, as Ecodelogic explains. It’s a way for those people to help find the causes and cures for the diseases that haunt humanity.

As I sat listening to Jeff Williams talk about ResearchKit, I thought to myself, this is why I love Apple—they care. They don’t just talk the talk and put out press releases about massive donations they make to charities, they are actually making a difference and putting the power of the most successful company in the world behind what they say.

There are world-class institutes that have already made apps for researching asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. This isn’t a pipe dream that we hope will happen someday, it’s happening right now.

To make sure everyone can benefit from ResearchKit, Apple is making the software open source.

During the presentation today, one of the researchers said they sent out 60,000 letters, which led to about 300 people participating in their research study. With the iPhone, there are potentially millions of people that can participate in research in near real-time. The amount of data that doctors can collect and analyze will be staggering. For the first time, we may understand the cause and cures of diseases so much better than we ever have before.

Apple is a products and services company. They are a very rich company. They have proven today that they care about more than just profits—Bravo.