“Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company’s plans,” Christina Farr reports for CNBC. “The company quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs including primary care doctor, exercise coach and care navigator, as well as a phlebotomist to administer lab tests on-site.”
“This new primary care group — a group of clinical staff that is run independently from Apple but is dedicated to Apple employees — will initially only serve Apple’s employees in Santa Clara County, where its headquarters are located. Initially, it has two clinics in the county,” Farr reports. “A job listing for the ‘network’ posted on Indeed.com details ‘multiple, stunning state-of-the-art medical centers,’ in Santa Clara, a few miles north of its headquarters in Cupertino. One of the centers is at the new Apple Park campus, another job listing states.”
“The news comes as Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan announced ajoint effort to improve health care for their employees,” Farr reports. “Aside from the typical roles involved with a primary care clinic, Apple is also looking to hire “designers” who will help implement a program focused on preventing disease and promoting healthy behavior. It’s looking for a population health designer and clinical program design lead, listings show.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The better the perks, the better the retention.
This is a great example of being seen to eat your own dog food.
If Apple deploys a scheme like this on such a large scale, it will obviously provide a lot of feedback for Apple to improve it’s health care monitoring technology, but will also allow Apple and AC Wellness staff to develop best practice which can be deployed elsewhere. It has the potential to drive massive hardware sales and expose new users to the Apple ecosystem.
It’s hard to see a downside to this idea.
Some people won’t want their employer that involved in their medical care. Will Apple have a medical staff in every apple store? Will their families all come to the mother ship for care? Will specialists be available? It seems like it will have some positives and it might work. On the other hand it might duplicate services that already exist and increase costs. But I am hopeful that Apple can help people (and their doctors) to improve health outcomes. It is time for our smartphones to help us improve our health.
Our company had our yearly wellness checkups and instead of bringing the nurses to us for the blood test they let us have free appointments at any Quest Diagnostic center for the month and we get 150 dollars each in Flexible spending dollars.
Thanks to the AppleWatch all of my important numbers were lower than 5 years ago and I thought Apple should team up with Quest, so much knowledge about me in both places.
Might also help “smooth feathers” at FDA, etc., re authorizing apps and devices as medical tools?