Roger Fingas
The director of Apple's health team, Anil Sethi, is leaving the company to found a startup called Ciitizen, fulfilling a promise to his sister Tania who died of cancer on Sept. 11.
Anil had already been away from the company for several months to care for Tania, with special permission from Apple COO Jeff Williams, CNBC said on Thursday. Anil promised to dedicate his life to improving cancer care for patients, which gave rise to Ciitzen. The business is aimed at making it easier for people to share data like lab results, wills, and advanced directives with researchers.
Once an engineer with Apple in the 1980s, Sethi rejoined the company in August last year when it bought out a medical record startup of his, Gliimpse. That outfit was geared towards making it easier to share records between healthcare providers.
Although the iOS Health app and the Apple Watch are largely consumer-oriented, Apple has also expressed interest in professional applications through CareKit, HealthKit, ResearchKit, and the Apple Heart Study. Medical records have been a particular focus, as evidenced by things like a partnership with Health Gorilla.
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4 Comments
We'll see how well this goes...from what we've seen/heard in the past, these people leave Apple to do a startup and end up failing.
Guy seems to have a fetish for the letter "i".
This, perhaps, is good...
Give Apple some fresh blood in the health arena which is kind of stuck in no-man's land between consumer products and the medical stuff...
"The business is aimed at making it easier for people to share data like lab results, wills, and advanced directives with researchers."
Well, come on... The Health App won't even allow me to type in my cholesterol numbers much less download them from the lab.
So, I continue to maintain a manilla folder stuffed with lab results -- which I take with me anytime I see a physician. I may be old, but I think old-school is dumb. But then, most physicians that I see are old school anyways and probably wouldn't know what to do with something that isn't on a piece of paper.