This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
We’ve all seen the explosive growth that’s occurred in the wearables market. The most extraordinary part of the wearables explosion is that the majority of wearables growth has been in the healthcare space. The problem we now see in healthcare is that most people don’t look at wearables as a disease management tool as much as they see them as lifestyle tools. This was described really well by Megan Williams on the Samsung Insights blog:
Perhaps the most challenging part of meeting that desire [Physician Access to Patients’ Lives and Health] is the fact that patients mostly view wearables as an aid in lifestyle improvement instead of disease management. The task of helping patients understand that wearables are about much more than weight loss will fall squarely on the shoulders of providers.
Patients have traditionally shown a preference for lifestyle apps including fitness, nutrition and heart rate aids, and have been much slower to adopt disease management tools, even as chronic disease remains a burden on healthcare as a whole. Encouraging the use of a broader range of wearables, digital tools and apps will be a challenge for any provider.
Changing habits and perceptions is always a challenge. However, it’s also a great opportunity.
No one would argue that today’s wearables are more than novelty items that may have some impact on your lifestyle (fitness, nutrition, etc). That’s largely because the initial wearables were designed around those retail areas of the market. It’s much easier to create a retail wearable device than to create a disease management focused healthcare device.
As the healthcare wearables market matures so will patients expectations around the benefits they can receive from those wearables. I think there are two main keys to development of wearables as true healthcare devices: Depth of Tracking and Connection to Providers.
Depth of Tracking
I’ve argued for a while now that all the various fitness trackers were not clinically relevant. I still believe that today, but I also believe that wearables like the various fitness trackers will start tracking us in ways that are clinically relevant. That just takes a lot longer to develop.
Whether it’s new trackers that screen for sleep apnea or ECGs that monitor our heart, we’re seeing more and more wearable devices monitoring data that’s more clinically relevant than the number of steps you’ve taken. This trend will continue. As wearables more deeply track various parts of the human body, the opportunities to understand your health and improve your health will follow along with it. This will provide doctors the impetus to request access to your wearable data.
The deep data these wearables will provide will challenge the tried and true beliefs healthcare holds so dearly today. That can be scary for some, but is also very exciting.
Connection to Providers
While wearables will provide the data, we’ll still want to consult a healthcare provider to understand the data and to create a plan of action based on that data. At least in the foreseeable future, our health will depend on collaboration with healthcare providers as opposed to a replacement of healthcare providers. This will be particularly true as the type of data our wearables collect gets more complicated. Understanding your step chart is quite different than understanding your ECG.
In order to facilitate this collaboration, our wearables will have to be connected to our care providers. Note that I said care providers and not doctors. In some cases it might be our doctor, but in other cases it could be a nurse, care manager, social worker, or some other care provider. I’m hopeful that we eventually reach the point of a true care team that collaborates on our health. That’s a far cry from where most of our healthcare is today, but that is the hope.
If we can solve these two wearable challenges: Deeper Data and Connected Providers, then we’ll be well on our way to changing how patients view wearables. This shift won’t happen over night, but I believe it will happen a lot quicker than most people imagine.
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