Health insurer Anthem recruits from Apple to bolster digital plans

In the past several months, U.S. health insurer Anthem has reportedly hired a half dozen Apple veterans to improve its digital offerings, including high-level employees with valuable industry experience.

Among the new recruits are former Apple VP Ted Goldstein, now in charge of Anthem's AI and health data projects, CNBC said in a report on Tuesday. Others include senior machine learning researcher Stefanos Giampanis, Apple Health's Warris Bokhari and Toni Trujillo Vian, who was with Apple for 24 years. Berick Bacani, once an Apple operations specialist, has been brought on as a user experience (UX) designer.

According to the report, Anthem's efforts to recruit Apple talent stems in part from Aneesh Kumar, Anthem's company vice president of commercial products who spent six years as an Apple product manager in 1990.

The exact impetus behind the hiring spree is uncertain, but some Anthem projects include partnering with doc.ai to detect allergy patterns, and Act Wise, a site for health plans to manage workers' benefits.

Typically, health-related hiring has been reported going in the opposite direction as Apple looks to improve its development and testing for platforms like HealthKit, CareKit, ResearchKit and the Apple Watch. The tech giant's upcoming iOS 13 and watchOS 6, for example, will add menstrual cycle tracking when they launch this fall.

In May, Apple was revealed to have bought Tueo Health, a startup specializing in asthma monitoring for sleeping children. Tueo's CEO and COO now work for Apple.

11 Comments

mobird 20 Years · 758 comments

About 5 years ago

"Aneesh Kumar, Anthem's company vice president of commercial products who spent six years as an Apple product manager in 1990."

I guess it must have felt like it was 6 years... :*

macseeker 8 Years · 541 comments

Strange, I thought Anthem was dying since they left California. They're no longer offering any insurance here.

rob53 13 Years · 3312 comments

macseeker said:

Strange, I thought Anthem was dying since they left California. They're no longer offering any insurance here.

Anthem is still offering insurance but it might be limited to corporate, group accounts where they can rake in the big bucks.

Of course, once Medicare For All is implemented, Anthem and all the other health insurance loan shark companies won't have any customers. If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, please check how much these insurance companies charge for their insurance. I was paying >$2K/mo for Anthem EPO coverage for myself and my wife. I now pay a third of that for Medicare with a gap plan (that would also go away). This doesn't have anything to do with this article except for the possible poor judgement on the part of Apple employees going over to a company that might dump them at any time.

CheeseFreeze 7 Years · 1339 comments

rob53 said:

macseeker said:

Strange, I thought Anthem was dying since they left California. They're no longer offering any insurance here.

Anthem is still offering insurance but it might be limited to corporate, group accounts where they can rake in the big bucks.

Of course, once Medicare For All is implemented, Anthem and all the other health insurance loan shark companies won't have any customers. If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, please check how much these insurance companies charge for their insurance. I was paying >$2K/mo for Anthem EPO coverage for myself and my wife. I now pay a third of that for Medicare with a gap plan (that would also go away). This doesn't have anything to do with this article except for the possible poor judgement on the part of Apple employees going over to a company that might dump them at any time.

Living both in the Netherlands and California, I can tell the US healthcare system is one big, corrupt, rigged game. Pay premium, get nothing. Health care in the Netherlands, as well as the entire infrastructure behind it, is so much better, the difference is huge! The US feels like it’s either the worst of a developed country, or the best of an undeveloped country.

GeorgeBMac 8 Years · 11421 comments

rob53 said:

macseeker said:

Strange, I thought Anthem was dying since they left California. They're no longer offering any insurance here.

Anthem is still offering insurance but it might be limited to corporate, group accounts where they can rake in the big bucks.

Of course, once Medicare For All is implemented, Anthem and all the other health insurance loan shark companies won't have any customers. If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, please check how much these insurance companies charge for their insurance. I was paying >$2K/mo for Anthem EPO coverage for myself and my wife. I now pay a third of that for Medicare with a gap plan (that would also go away). This doesn't have anything to do with this article except for the possible poor judgement on the part of Apple employees going over to a company that might dump them at any time.

Your Medicare is cheaper because you (and others) have been paying into it your entire working life. The basic driver of our out-of-control health care spending is the providers: Big Pharma and the Large provider organizations. We keep looking at different ways to juggle paying for those expenses (Obamacare, unregulated insurance, Medicare for all, etc...) -- but that's like a family juggling its bill paying after they have already spent the money.

That's not to defend insurers or demean Medicare -- just to point out that we need to find ways to attack the source of the problem rather than the result of the problem.