Apple buys personal health record aggregator Gliimpse

Purchase earlier this year adds to technology giant’s list of consumer health offerings.


Apple has purchased Gliimpse, a healthcare startup that has developed a personal health record platform that enables individuals to collect their medical information and share records with medical professionals who are treating them.

Business press carried news of the acquisition today after reports on some technology news websites. On Tuesday morning, the website for Gliimpse could not be accessed, and Apple does not comment on its acquisitions, only saying through a statement that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Gliimpse was founded by Anil Sethi, who was frustrated by the incompatibility of electronic health records systems. The company’s technology enables individuals to collect, personalize and share a picture of their health data. The beta test of the product launched last October, and it was selected as one of 10 finalists in the Health 2.0 Conference Launch competition last year.

“The health IT industry currently has a decade long goal of cracking electronic medical record (EMR) system interoperability,” Sethi said at the time. “Instead, Gliimpse has shown that a more pragmatic solve to interoperability is patient-mediated data portability. Patients don’t want all their clinical details siloed away in a hospital’s EMR. Folks just need a glimpse into their health, so they can use Gliimpse to collect, curate and share their personal health stories with professionals and family, or even to pay it forward and donate their anonymized data to accelerate cures.”

As a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform, Gliimpse enables users to immediately graph trends and have a sense of ownership around their health, with the ability to combine fragmented health data from disparate clinical systems and personalize their health profile with patient reported outcomes.

Software-driven automation of its patient data pipeline is powered by a series of computational algorithms—sequenced into a data refining pipeline—enabling users to collect data and share snapshots of their health information, while moving from siloed patient portals to a personalized longitudinal health profile.

Gliimpse, as a potential data aggregator across EHR platforms, thus could be a good fit for Apple, which has been focusing on making health and fitness data available to both consumers and the health industry through HealthKit, ResearchKit and CareKit.

Additional reports suggest that Apple’s new operating system, iOS10, which is now in beta testing, will enable users to store their health records directly in the built-in Health App using the Health Level 7 Continuity of Care Document (HL7 CCD) standard.

These reports also indicate that the HL7 standard health records will be able to be imported from Mail, Safari, and other applications.

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