In a move that will undoubtedly be welcomed by the employees benefitting from it, Apple has decided to launch a number of health clinics that will be known as ‘AC Wellness’ for its workers and their families.
The company has launched a website (acwellness.com) which provides additional information about its plans in this regard, as well as a jobs page listing positions for, among others, an exercise coach, primary care physician, care navigator and a phlebotomist – whose job it will be to manage on-site lab tests.
The planned primary care facilities – a clinical staff group that will be managed independently from the company but will only provide services to Apple employees – will for now only serve Apple workers in Santa Clara County, where the firm’s headquarters are situated. There will initially be two clinics in this county.
Apple seems to be making good progress with these plans.
A job opening for the ‘network’ was recently listed on Indeed.com. It talks about ‘multiple, stunning state-of-the-art medical centers’ in Santa Clara – which is of course only a couple of miles from Apple’s head office in Cupertino. Another job listing indicates that one of the two centres is located at the company’s new Apple Park headquarters.
A quick LinkedIn search showed that employees who used to work for Stanford Health Care have been involved with AC Wellness since around October last year, although on those individual’s profiles the name ‘Apple’ is not mentioned anywhere.
As of Tuesday, quite a few of the job advertisements on Apple’s website talk about AC Wellness as ‘a subsidiary of Apple, Inc.’
A medical group is, of course, able to contract out to non-medical managers via a subsidiary. A spokesperson for Apple earlier refused to be quoted about the matter.