Apple has reportedly acquired Gliimpse, a medical tech start-up which was founded by Indian entrepreneurs Anil Sethi who happens to be an ex-Apple employee and Kartik Hariharan who is an IIT Chennai graduate. As per the Linkedin Page of Anil Sethi, Gliimpse is described as “We enable patients to collect their lifelong history, so they can share it with their care network – physicians, friends and family.”
Further, Sethi also said that he is actually helping his little sister manage her Stage IV Breast Cancer diagnosis, through this data. “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 .Worse, there isn’t even a common file format across a 1000+ systems,” – his bio read indicating how Gliimpse was actually set up and came into existence.
Apple has recently implemented a lot of health services on a software level through integrating apps such as iHealth. Earlier also we have seen that the US smartphone manufacturer has been always keen to integrate and work with these health start-ups in order to make this data available easily for its users. Mentioning the importance of Health and the challenges we face, Tim Cook the CEO of Apple said earlier this year, “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.”
Well it’s too early to conclude as to how will Apple benefit with this acquisition and how it will integrate into its eco-system. As to what Gliimpse does as of now? It basically collects data from different medical portals and combine it with the self-entered data all without any human interference. It will be really exciting to see how Gliimpse can help Apple and you never know it may be integrated the next iOS version as well.