One of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s top priorities of late is getting his company more deeply involved in the $9 trillion global healthcare market. Cook has been hiring top talent to fuel the expansion, including the recent addition of Google X lab co-founder Yoky Matsuoka.
Apple continues to bolster its top brass with the addition of Evan Doll, a former Apple engineer who left to co-found the news app Flipboard. Doll is now director of health software engineering at Apple as of last month, according to his LinkedIn page.
The Doll hire was earlier reported by Bloomberg.
Doll worked at Apple previously from 2003 through 2009 as a software engineer, contributing to some of the earliest iPhone apps, such as the clock, calendar, and e-mail programs.
After leaving Apple, he started Flipboard, an app that gathers news from a variety of sources and presents it in an easy-to-ready format. Doll and some other top employees at Flipboard left last fall as the company sought a buyer. He had since been listed as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif.
The iPhone maker already has a number of health-related initiatives underway, which are overseen by Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams. Among the existing programs are the HealthKit framework for developing apps, ResearchKit for using mobile devices in medical studies, and CareKit for helping individuals improve their own medical care.
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Apple has said its smartwatch and other wearable devices could become critical in diagnosing, researching, and treating illnesses and medical conditions. The company may seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration for future products, according to some reports. Apple has also boasted its ResearchKit software framework is in use by top medical facilities, including the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.