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While Apple has publicly expressed its desire to grow within the healthcare industry, a new report from Initiated says today that efforts are “faltering” internally. The report, which is based on “conversations with 11 current and former Apple employees and the review of dozens of documents,” says Apple health officials “are suppressing concerns and misleading executives.” .
Apple currently has “several hundred engineers, program managers, data scientists, desires and doctors” working on health-related projects, the report said. The efforts are overseen by COO Jeff Williams, as previously reported. Williams reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
The report says some employees have suffered “retaliation for disagreeing with their superiors.”
Apple Health employees have said they have seen colleagues face retaliation for disagreeing with their superiors and that concerns have been repeatedly voiced about how health data is used to develop products. The situation has become so dire that some employees have filed complaints with Apple’s top executives, including Cook and COO Jeff Williams, who oversees the health care efforts.
The report cites a specific situation in which Dr Will Poe, who worked for Apple’s Health Group, sent a “fiery” resignation letter directly to Cook. Poe alleged that health team workers were misleading Williams about the state of the effort.
The email, written by Dr. Will Poe, was a resignation letter. And several people who saw it and heard about it said it was a bombshell that explained, in dazzling terms, why employees of Apple’s Health Group were unable to do meaningful work. He said there was a lack of strategy and health leadership was blocking efforts to provide direction. Those affected are being made redundant or fired, he said, according to the population.
One of his main concerns was that members of the health center team told Williams that the patient care they provided was “of high quality.” But at that time, Apple was not measuring quality in clinics with standardized measures, some people said, and was rounding off the results of patient satisfaction surveys in journals.
Poe shared his concerns with his colleagues and quickly found himself uninvited to meetings and criticized by Apple executives for his lack of confidence, according to three people. Several employees sent similar emails and resignation letters to Cook and Williams from 2019 to 2021, according to documents and screenshots seen by Insider. Williams hosted a roundtable to solicit comments from the division. But beyond that, it’s unclear how seriously Cook and Williams took the complaints.
It has also spread to the “product side of health,” according to the report, with those working on tools to measure blood oxygen levels and detect irregular heart rhythms feeling pressure to “distort progress. “to Williams.
Apple denies
Apple has denied many of the claims made in the article through its spokesperson Fred Sainz, its senior director of corporate communications. Sainz said Initiated that Apple is in the “early stages of our health technology work” and that the claims of the story “are based on incomplete, outdated and inaccurate information.”
Sainz also said that “all allegations of retaliatory behavior are fully investigated and addressed with appropriate corrective action.”
As for claims that Apple altered health survey data, Sainz said, “Data integrity isn’t just part of our process – it’s the foundation upon which all innovation is built. Using inaccurate data would only hurt the Apple teams that depend on it, and hurt the quality of the user experience. ”
Finally, Sainz – along with some Apple employees – said that Apple’s current vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, is doing everything possible to create a “transparent environment” for employees.
“All healthcare leaders encourage employees to always do the right thing, speak up and raise questions,” Sainz said. Desai has tried to create a more transparent environment, a former employee said, and asked health officials to encourage comments, another former employee said.
“Since joining Apple, Dr. Desai has been instrumental in the many features we have released, and a strong collaborator, because everything at Apple is done between multiple teams and requires close teamwork,” said Sainz, adding that Apple is proud to employ Desai.
The full report on Initiated worth reading and can be found here. The report comes as Tim Cook has publicly stated that Apple’s greatest contribution to humanity “will be something related to health.
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