Apple is launching medical clinics to deliver the ‘world’s best healthcare experience’ to its employees
Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its own employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company’s plans. 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.
The new primary care group will initially only serve Apple’s employees in Santa Clara County, where its headquarters are located. At present, it includes only two clinics. Development appears to be well underway.
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. And a LinkedIn search reveals that at least former Stanford Health Care employees have been affiliated with AC Wellness for at least five months, although there’s no mention of Apple on the people’s profiles. Several of the job listings on Apple’s site as of Feb. 27, however, describe AC Wellness as a “subsidiary of Apple, Inc.”
The news comes as Amazon has launched its own effort with Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan to improve healthcare for those companies’ employees. Delivering better primary care is key to the success of all of these employee-led efforts, as it’s far cheaper to prevent disease than treat people who are already sick.
Health problems result in 69 million workers reporting missed days each year, reducing economic output by $260 billion per year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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. These designers will work with operations and technology teams.
Sources said the company will leverage its medical clinics as a way to test out its growing range of health services and products, which it is starting to roll out to consumers at large. It is currently working with Stanford to study whether its Apple Watch can detect irregularities with the heart’s rhythm, an effort that would benefit from a huge population of healthy and sick patients.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told shareholders that it could make a “significant contribution” in healthcare.
Apple recently scaled back its contract with its current in-house clinic via a start-up called Crossover Health, which CNBC reported that it had considered buying. Sources said that it started notifying third-party vendors about the shift to its own network of health clinics this week. Additional AC Wellness jobs are also listed on Glassdoor and Indeed.com.
