Apple reportedly considered launching its own subscription-based primary care medical clinics with Apple-employed doctors, says the Wall Street Journal. The plan — part of Apple’s push into health and wellness — was supposedly conceived in 2016. However, it’s not clear whether it is still on the cards today.
The report notes that:
“An Apple team spent months trying to figure out how the flood of health and wellness data collected from users of its smartwatch, first released in 2015, might be used to improve healthcare, the people said.
Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the health team, urged employees to think big. He said Apple should disrupt what he called the ‘363’ and ‘break fix’ model of care in the U.S., where patients may not see their doctors 363 days a year and only visit when something goes wrong, according to people familiar with his ideas.
The team decided one of the best ways to realize that vision was to provide a medical service of its own, said people familiar with the plan, linking data generated by Apple devices with virtual and in-person care provided by Apple doctors. Apple would offer primary care, but also continuous health monitoring as part of a subscription-based personalized health program, according to these people and the documents.”
Apple’s medical franchise
The report notes that Apple did, however, get as far as testing the service on its employees. Apple supposedly took over employee health clinics near its Cupertino HQ and turn these into test beds. It hired Dr. Sumbul Desai from Stanford University to run the project. The project was codenamed Caspar.
According to the WSJ, the project continues today, although Apple has “struggled to move Casper” beyond the early stages. The unit has supposedly seen multiple departures in terms of employees. It is also reported by the department culture “discourages critical feedback,” which may have dented progress. The WSJ continues that:
“Some employees expressed concerns that internal data about the clinics’ performance, data that was recently used to support the rollout of a new digital health app, has been inaccurate or compiled haphazardly, according to the documents and people familiar with the data.”
Whether this takes off remains to be seen. The report notes that, if it was successful, one idea Apple looked at involved franchising the model. Some of Apple’s more sideways initiatives under Tim Cook, such as Apple Pay, have been a massive success. But there’s also the chance this never happens and ends up as a bit of Cupertino trivia — like the ill-fated Apple-themed restaurants.
Source: Wall Street Journal
