Apple acquires health tech startup Gliimpse

Apple has acquired Gliimpse, a technology startup that translates medical records into actionable data, reports Fast Company. The acquisition reportedly happened earlier this year, although it hasn’t been officially announced. Fast Company says that Apple has now confirmed it, making their staple comment that "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Gliimpse was founded in 2013 by one-time Apple employee and serial entrepreneur Anil Sethi and IIT Chennai graduate Karthik Hariharan. It collates users’ personal health data from different platforms, turning information from labs, hospitals, and pharmacies into a single shareable report. According to Sethi, who got the idea while watching his sister navigate through her breast cancer treatment, “We enable patients to collect their lifelong history, so they can share it with their care network – physicians, friends, and family.”

Apple has been focusing a lot on health technologies and has integrated HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit at the operating system level.

Speaking in Amsterdam earlier this year he said health is one of the focus areas for his company when it comes to “some of the society’s biggest problems and challenges”. “And arguably the health care system can be made much simpler, can have much better results, you can have patients that really feel like customers...and have systems and applications that bring out the best in the medical professionals…I think the runway there is enormous.”

Apple is already working with many startups and institutions to take health data integration to the next level. However, there are some associated privacy and security questions as well due to the highly sensitive data that could be collected. There are many ways in which Gliimpse technology can be integrated into Apple devices and ecosystem, however, it is too early to guess exactly how it will work.