Apple poaches Dr. Rajiv Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist from Stanford Children’s Health

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In yet another sign of its commitment to advancing health-related services across its platforms, Apple has quietly poached Dr. Rajiv Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist from Stanford Children’s Health, Fast Company has learned. Kumar specializes in treating kids with diabetes.

Additionally, he also is the creator of a HealthKit-enabled diabetes monitoring system for young patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University. Lucile CEO Christopher Dawes has confirmed to the publication that Kumar left for Apple.

“We can’t compete with companies like Apple, Google and Facebook when they really want one of our own,” said the hospital’s CEO in an interview with Fast Company.

The publication writes:

With his HealthKit pilot application, Kumar used Apple’s software to help his patients aggregate important health data such as their blood sugar levels, and share it via their iPhone with caregivers and medical professionals.

To avoid getting overwhelmed with his patient’s data, Kumar would receive a bi-monthly report on overall trends. It might show, for instance, if a patient had consistently low blood sugar overnight.

Apple has been recruiting a team of medical experts on a regular basis as it looks to advance its HealthKit, CareKit and ResearchKit platforms.

Over the past few months, the Cupertino firm poached a revered satellite navigation expert, Sinisa Durekovic, who holds a patent for preventing car collisions, a top expert in practical cryptography, Jon Callas, a pair of wireless charging engineers from uBeam and Google X Lab co-founder and Nest’s former technology chief, Yoky Matsuoka—in spite of rumors of it slowing down recruiting efforts.

Source: Fast Company