FFrom smartwatches to fitness trackers, wearable technology presents an opportunity to transform how patients understand their health long after they leave the clinic. However, adoption of this technology has been slow for both patients and healthcare professionals.
Shamal Patel and Dr. David Eigs gathered at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on October 22nd to discuss emerging trends in health care during a panel discussion moderated by TIME's Senior Health Correspondent Alice Park. We discussed the current state of technology and its impact.
Wearable technology has the potential to help monitor patients' sleep patterns, blood pressure and menstrual cycles, but it has not yet been widely adopted in healthcare, said Agus, founding director and co-CEO of Ellison Institute of Technology. he says. “It's not normalized yet.”
One reason for this is that many healthcare providers lack training on how to analyze data. “We still haven't built the capacity on the healthcare side to really think about and understand how to take this data and make sense of it,” said TIME100 Health Leadership Forum. said Patel, executive vice president and scientific director of sponsor OURURA. . “If we have continuous health blood pressure data, how do we know it and what do we do with it? Our medical practice is built around a single blood pressure measurement in the clinic.”
There's also not enough communication between the medical technology industry and healthcare providers, Patel said. “The U.S. has a fairly complex ecosystem of payers, providers (and) patients. Now you can add health technology companies to that mix,” he says. “The interests of all of these players don't necessarily always align, so I think we really need strong partnerships between these parties to focus on driving better health outcomes.”
Agus points out that there are several obstacles to the widespread adoption of wearable technology. Prices for consumer wearable technology are often unaffordable, and many products lack CMS billing codes for insurance reimbursement. Additionally, many medical professionals still hope for research that proves that data from wearable technology is accurate and can encourage behavioral changes in patients.
“Interventions that can impact outcomes are what we need, and companies need to put money up front and do research that shows they can impact outcomes. ,” says Agus. “And once we do that, these technologies need to be promoted by all of us and made available to patients, and they need to be accessible.”
It's been more than a decade since consumer wearable technology like fitness trackers and smart rings first became mainstream, but the industry has plenty of room to grow. “One aspect is that with the evolution of this technology and what we can do with it, and having access to this personal health technology, we will be able to better understand many aspects of our health. That's true,” says Patel. “And the second aspect is how do we understand that and incorporate it into the practice of medicine?”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was hosted by Merck, Deloitte, OURA, and PhRMA.
