Apple has hired Divya Nag, founder of digital health accelerator StartX Med, who confirmed the new position on her LinkedIn page, according to a report from VentureBeat. A source told VentureBeat that Nag will be "leading Apple’s health care initiatives".

Her LinkedIn profile also explains she will be working on special projects at Apple.

StartX Med, which is run out of Stanford, incubated several digital health startups including health question and answer app MedWhat, nutrition app maker Nutrivise, which was acquired by Jawbone last year, and sleep and fitness tracker maker Lark.

Before she founded StartX Med, Nag was a researcher at Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and later cofounded Stem Cell Theranostics, a company that focuses on drug discovery through "the use of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells".

This is at least the eight high profile health-related hire at Apple in the past year. MobiHealthNews has a roundup of several others here.

Since HealthKit was announced in June, it's become clear that Apple is serious about developing a health-focused app, though it's still unclear how health-related the forthcoming "iWatch" wearable will be.

Last week, in the latest update to the iOS 8 beta, Apple added a number of health-related features. Most notably, the company added a data tracking capability for spirometry, which is data about how obstructed the lungs are collected by people with conditions like asthma or COPD.

Then this week, new reports suggested Apple’s announced partnership with EHR provider Epic Systems may not be an exclusive one. According to reports, Apple is in talks with Allscripts about how HealthKit could integrate with its systems, as well as with Johns Hopkins, Mt. Sinai, and the Cleveland Clinic. Of these organizations, all but the Cleveland Clinic declined to comment.