Apple took another bold bite of the health care sector when it bought the health data platform startup Gliimpse.

The deal for the firm, which was launched by Anil Sethi and Karthik Hariharan in 2013, happened earlier this year, but just came to light in a report by Fast Company.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said the tech giant, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Gliimpse lets individuals manage their own health records, and is billed in a company release, “as the world's first automated Personal Health Data platform allowing any U.S. individual to collect, personalize and share a picture of their health data.”

The effort sprang from personal experience for Sethi. His own sister's battle with Stage IV breast cancer showed him just how tough it was to deal with health care information from many different sources, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“As a consumer of health care, I leave behind a 'breadcrumb 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 ... you get the idea. However, there’s no single Electronic Health Record that all physicians use, sigh. Worse, there isn't even a common file format across a 1000+ systems.

“Enter Gliimpse: your personal health data, in the palm of your hands. Better than portals, we enable patients to collect their lifelong history, so they can share it with their care network – physicians, friends and family.

“Gliimpse solved the hardest medical data problem, aggregation plus standardization. Our product collects data from medical portals – without human intervention – combined with self-entered, plus wearable info, all shared with others.”

One advantage to this approach is that patient-controlled health-data portability avoids potential HIPAA issues while allowing electronic medical record (EMR) interoperability. “The future of digital health, including the potential of genomic big data in health care, becomes possible only through the patient,” noted Sethi.

After years of struggle by the health care IT industry to make EMR systems interoperable, Gliimpse took “a more pragmatic” approach that focused on “patient-mediated data portability,” according to the company statement, noting that Gliimpse also allows users to create graphs to highlight their health trends. This can give patients a sense of personal ownership for both their health data and their health.

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