Apple is interested in serving ‘the worried well,’ not in ‘post-sick health care’
With a slew of health features and technologies both on the market and still in the incubator, Apple is mainly interested in serving “the worried well” – healthy people who want to stay that way and those who might need to shed a few pounds. The company is not interested in “post-sick health care,” perferring to leave that tricky business to health care professionals.
Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett for Bloomberg News:
Today there remains a sense — both inside Apple and in the broader world of public health — of unfulfilled potential. The company’s effort to weave health monitoring and disease prevention into its bestselling devices has yielded breakthroughs, but the strategy has also been short-circuited by philosophical disagreements, a culture of conservatism and technological realities. Apple has scrapped or slowed work on a broad range of promising projects, frustrating some of the doctors and engineers it hired to work on them.
The late essayist Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Apple, by focusing on prevention, has preferred to stay in the kingdom of the well. Its core market is what’s known in industry parlance as the “worried well,” those of us anxiously trying to decipher our body’s signals for evidence that something is wrong. That makes a certain amount of sense for a consumer electronics company. Moving into curing or even caring for diseases would entangle the company in a web of different countries’ regulatory regimes and present hard questions about business models. But taking them on might also mean more lives saved. And that is a recurring tension within the company.
“The main takeaway from their whole strategy is that they shy away from the actual care,” said Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of Forward, a company that runs a chain of high-tech in-person and remote clinics. Apple is building “awesome technologies,” but they’re “skating around the problem,” he said. “Health care is messy, and you have to get your hands dirty,” he said. “At some point you have to be ready to draw blood.”
Prototypes and projects that don’t make it to market are commonplace in the tech world. However, some of those working on the new technologies have chafed at the cautious nature of Apple’s efforts. They say company engineers and doctors have long had to contend with fears from top executives that a poor medical experience with Apple could tarnish the perception of the company. “Tim and Jeff are so terrified of doing something wrong and are focused on protecting the company’s image,” one person said, referring to Cook and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who is responsible for the company’s health work. Other people with knowledge of the health team also attribute the cautiousness to privacy requirements and to the difficulty of gathering viable health data from the wrist.
“Apple is going after nanotechnology and software,” a person involved in [Apple’s work on noninvasive blood glucose for Apple Watch] said. “That’s what we are very good at. What we’re not interested in is post-sick health care.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is smart to provide sound health monitoring tools without opening the Pandora’s box of litigation that would come with “post-sick health care.”
There’s tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
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