Report: Apple Buys Personal Health Startup Gliimpse

Apple has quietly purchased a startup called Gliimpse that handles people’s personal data and medical records.

Gliimpse was created to deal with a very American problem, in that medical records for US people can often be difficult to share or access because of federal regulations, as well as incompatible file formats and poor data sharing between various medical institutions in that country.

Magical Machine

“We’ve built a magical machine,” says Gliimpse on its website. “It takes incomprehensible electronic medical records and turns them into understandable, standardised, coded elements (LOINC, RxNorm, CPT, ICD and SNOMED), and terminology that both humans and machines can easily understand and use.”

Essentially it seems that Gliimpse has developed a personal health data platform that enables any American to collect, personalise, and share their health data.

News of the acquisition, which reportedly happened earlier this year, was revealed by the Fast Company.

Apple is said to have responded with the following boiler plate statement.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” it reportedly said.

Health Kick

Apple of course has had its eye on the healthcare market for a while now.

In 2014 it considered a fitness and health application known as Healthbook in iOS 8, to allow iPhone users to track data in a number of categories, harvested from the smartphone itself, third party devices and applications, and possibly a health-focused iWatch.

And earlier this year Apple detailed the first applications built on CareKit, a framework which allows developers to create apps that can track and monitor health information and then share that easily with doctors.

Apple is also thought to be introducing a Health app in iOS10, which would allow users to store electronic health records within the app.

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