Health IT

How will wearables impact the consumer healthcare marketplace?

The ability to combine health and fitness data from various sources, leveraging analytics to draw conclusions and make recommendations, creates the framework for incentive programs.

wearablesThe human body produces a staggering amount of data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (and 366 days in a leap year ?). We are only at the beginning of a journey to help us understand the impact of activities, sleep, temperature, perspiration and other data points of the human body, with over 100 different wearable devices available in today’s marketplace to monitor our health and fitness. The wearable marketplace is growing at a meteoric rate, estimated to grow from $7.1 billion in 2015 to $12.6 billion by 2018. Worldwide shipments of healthcare wearables were forecast to total 34 million units in 2015, up from 13 million in 2013.

With those facts in mind, here are four areas of the consumer healthcare marketplace to watch as we move from an early adopter to early majority market, and engineers release their next generation of wearable consumer healthcare devices:

The Impact of HealthKit on the Wearable and Consumer Healthcare Markets

Today, it’s difficult to talk about the consumer healthcare market and wearables without acknowledging Apple and the potential impact of HealthKit on the healthcare marketplace.

Formally introduced in June 2014, the HealthKit framework allows developers the ability to share information among devices without the necessity of forming partnerships or negotiating relationships with other developers. This creates the opportunity to share information among complementary applications much faster and at a lower cost than otherwise available, leading to more comprehensive health and fitness information than available from standalone wearable devices.

Beyond the technical aspects of HeathKit, Apple has an amazing ability to create markets. Not only is Apple promoting HeathKit to developers, it’s partnering with healthcare and EMR providers to support HealthKit and integrate it into their clinical operations. This raises the possibility of wearables quickly moving from a motivational device to something used in a meaningful way to diagnose, treat and monitor patient care.

Moving from Data Collection to Actionable Information
We’re generating data at an ever-increasing rate and we’re good at collecting it.  But what are we supposed to do with it? The question is no longer what data to collect or how to collect it – the question is, how do we create and present actionable information from data?

For example, early entrants in the wearable marketplace have done a good job collecting and presenting information on our sleep patterns – REM and non-REM sleep, how often we turned, how many times we were restless, etc. But what are we supposed to do with that information? How do we take that basic information and turn it into an action that improves our health and fitness?

Answers to these questions are found in analytics. Analytics have advanced to the point where data can be combined from numerous sources to create actionable information. We’re moving from a period where devices merely signaled alerts and present basic data to an era when information is presented that instructs us about what to do to improve our health and fitness, based on the data collected through a variety of wearable and consumer healthcare devices.

Advanced analytics is the foundation of the next generation of wearable devices.

The Re-Emergence of Personal Health Records and its Influence on Healthcare Institutions

Google, Apple, Samsung, and other leading technology companies are pouring money into wearable technologies and applications. This flood of energy and R&D is having an effect on many healthcare institutions including Insurance, Patient Care, and Pharmaceuticals.

Insurance

The ability to combine health and fitness data from various sources, leveraging analytics to draw conclusions and make recommendations, creates the framework for incentive programs. Incentive programs may be used to manage risk and associated premiums for various forms of insurance coverage.

Patient Care

Wearables present exciting opportunities to improve the quality of healthcare through the integration of wearable data with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions. The opportunity is to provide physicians greater insight to all aspects of patient care ranging from diagnosis, treatment, adherence, and preventative care activities. While the opportunities are great, especially as they relate to treating chronic illness, there are still many challenges with data integration across disparate, dated platforms and technologies, but also the accuracy of these consumer grade devices

Pharmaceutical

While there aren’t immediate benefits of wearables in terms of producing new drugs, clinical trials are an interesting area where wearables may have a big impact. The ability to monitor patients in live trials may speed drug approval and better identify patients most likely to react positively to prescribed medications.

The Impact of Remote Patient Monitoring

Wearables are having an impact on healthcare, and the possibilities are promising. Whether it’s treating chronic illness such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity or monitoring the care of patients recently released from care or being treated in-home, technology is changing the way physicians monitor patients and are alerted to patient conditions requiring care.

Imagine loved ones at home alone who experience a medical emergency and alerts are immediately sent to emergency care personnel on a patient’s blood sugar level, pulse, oxygenation, and blood pressure. A physician can immediately change treatment or order lab work to diagnose developing medical conditions, as they occur, as opposed to waiting weeks or months until a follow-up office visit. Physicians are ready for this use of technology (well, many of them). The issue for them is information integrity – knowing wearable’s data and its integration among devices and EMR is clinically sound.

The opportunities to leverage wearables to improve patient care are huge. And so are the privacy and security issues.

Security is a global IT issue, particularly sensitive in healthcare due to the personal nature of data and information collected, stored, and shared. From a technology perspective, security for wearable consumer healthcare markets are not unlike other markets where device, network, and data-at-rest security is common. As with all IT markets, security should never be an afterthought; rather it’s something that needs to be considered throughout the development process – SDLC norms apply. Developers need to be aware of the unique privacy concerns in healthcare such as HIPPA in the United States and similar privacy acts across the European Union.

As with all uses of wearable technology, patients and end-users will ultimately decide the balance between sharing information and protecting privacy and patient information.

Conclusions

The wearable and consumer healthcare markets are growing at a staggering rate, with billions of dollars and millions of devices moving among top technology vendors, start-ups, and consumers worldwide.

Innovations such as Apple’s HealthKit and advanced analytics are changing the way data is used to create actionable information, leading to the opportunity to quickly diagnose, treat, and even prevent illness. For physicians, this is welcome news with the potential to change patient care.

Patients who are generating data are at the center of the healthcare wearables market. Ultimately, they will drive the use of wearables and determine the acceptable balance between information sharing, privacy, and the associated level of security necessary to make applications valuable.

We’re welcoming the next generation of wearable consumer healthcare devices, and the possibilities to improve our personal health and fitness are endless.

Photo: Flickr userbHeidi Forbes Öste


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Eugene Borukhovich

Eugene Borukhovich is an international expert on healthcare information technology innovation. He is the founder and organizer of Health 2.0 NYC and Health 2.0 Amsterdam and is a leading advocate in healthcare consumer issues and open health data. He currently serves as senior VP and global vertical leader for healthcare at SoftServe, Inc., and can be followed on Twitter at @HealthEugene.

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