Enables Americans to collect, personalize, share a picture of their health data.
Silicon Valley-based personal health data startup Gliimpse, founded by two Indian Americans, Anil Sethi and Karthik Hariharan, has been acquired by Apple.
The deal was concluded earlier this year, but wasn’t confirmed by Apple untilMonday.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesman said Monday, reported The Wall Street Journal.
As Apple grapples with the first serious slump in iPhone sales since the product’s 2007 introduction, the company is looking to expand into new areas of business, including health care.
Gliimpse has built a personal health data platform that enables any American to collect, personalize, and share a picture of their health data, reported Fast Company.
The company was started in 2013 by Sethi and Hariharan. Sethi is a serial entrepreneur who has spent the past decade working with health startups, after taking his company Sequoia Software public in 2000. He got his start as a systems engineer at Apple in the late 1980s.
The acquisition happened earlier this year, but Apple has been characteristically quiet about it. The company has now confirmed the purchase, saying: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
According to Sethi’s LinkedIn page, Gliimpse—like many startups—was born of a personal need. Sethi says that he’s followed his sister through her battle with breast cancer and discovered firsthand how challenging it is to acquire and manage your personal health data. Sethi writes:
“As a consumer of healthcare, I leave behind a bread-crumb-trail of medical info wherever I’ve been seen. But, I’m unable to easily access or share my own data. Obamacare is one of several forcing functions federally mandating physicians and hospitals give us our data: meds, labs, allergies . . .you get the idea. However, there’s no single Electronic Health Record that all physicians use, sigh. Worse, there isn’t even a common file format across a 1000+ systems.”
The acquisition will bolster Apple’s efforts in digital health. In recent years, Apple has delved into the sector with a range of services (HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit) that allow patients, clinicians, and researchers to access important health and wellness data via a range of mobile devices. That’s in line with Gliimpse’s mission of uniting disparate streams of health information, according to Fast Company.
What stands out about the deal is that Gliimpse is intended for patients with diseases like cancer and diabetes. Apple recently hired a top pediatric endocrinologist who developed a HealthKit app for teens with Type 1 diabetes, signaling an increased interest in applications for chronically ill users.