Apple Acquires Health Tech Firm Gliimpse

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Apple has bought health technology firm Gliimpse, which helps translate complex medical data into easily comprehended terminology for both humans and machines.

According to Fast Company, the acquisition (the first by Apple’s health team) will help bolster the company’s efforts in digital health, enabling it to expand its suite of mobile health tools.

Gliimpse was established in 2013 by Anil Sethi and Karthik Hariharan, and was inspired by Sethi’s sister and her battle with breast cancer. During her treatment, he discovered how difficult it can be for patients to acquire and manage their own personal health data.

“As a consumer of healthcare, I leave behind a bread-crumb-trail of medical info wherever I’ve been seen,” said Sethi. “But, I’m unable to easily access or share my own data. There’s no single Electronic Health Record that all physicians use. Worse, there isn’t even a common file format across a 1000+ systems.”
Gliimpse’s technology aims to remedy that, using understandable, standardised coded elements to transform medical data from a vast array of sources into a single picture of patient health.

So far, Apple hasn’t seen the massive adoption of its HealthKit platform that it was hoping for following the release of the Apple Watch, hampered as it was with launch issues, but it clearly still has ambitions in the area.

Enabling users to share data with healthcare providers and vice versa could well be a key selling point when it comes to persuading users to adopt mHealth solutions, so an acquisition like Gliimpse seems like a smart purchase, as long as Apple can build a critical mass of users for its suite of health products.