Sumbul Desai, Apple VP of health, talks careers, medicine, and more in new podcast interview

Sumbul Desai
Sumbul Desai (Image credit: Sumbul Desai)

What you need to know

  • Apple VP of health Sumbul Desai appeared as an interviewee on the Second Life podcast.
  • Topics of discussion included health, careers, and more.

Sumbul Desai is a name that we've begun to see more of during Apple recent events, with the company's VP of health sharing details on where Apple is going next in terms of health. Now, in a new interview on the Second Life podcast Desai talks about her career, medicine, and more.

The wide-ranging 42-minute interview includes a discussion about Desai's role at Apple and the "multidisciplinary" approach it allows her to take to her work. The former vice chair of strategy and innovation at Stanford Medicine goes on to describe it as mixing various types of health and medicine as "like an orchestra and a symphony."

And then, of course, there's Apple's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, something that was spearheaded by Desai.

During the trying time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Desai helped lead Apple's response efforts and support for the vaccine. As the vaccines began to roll out, Desai and her team at Apple navigated the efforts around education by releasing helpful content that connected customers with experts for optimal support.

Apple's focus on health began with Apple Watch and continues via health updates made to iOS 15 and beyond. CEO Tim Cook famously said that health will be Apple's biggest contribution to the world and he might just have a point.

You can listen to the podcast via Apple Podcasts and the embedded player above. Alternatively, Spotify fans can also listen over there, too.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.