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#Connect2Health panelists ask: For clinicians, where’s the value in wearables?

Among consumers, wearables are growing in popularity. But what can clinicians actually gain from the data the devices collect? Panelists at the Connected Health Conference in Boston weighed in.

wearables

Wearables are gaining traction among consumers, so naturally, the topic was the primary discussion point of a panel at the Connected Health Conference in Boston this week.

Though the technology is increasing in popularity, what can clinicians actually gain from the data the devices collect?

Not all that much, posited Richard Milani, a physician and the chief clinical transformation officer at Ochsner Health System. He noted that most of the information from wearables isn’t extremely valuable. Activity, steps and sleep data are nice, but they’re not worthwhile to providers.

“Currently, the data is quite limited in terms of what we collect from wearables,” Milani said. “Wearables are an important component of our future, but what we seek is information.”

Yet James Mault, another physician and CMO of Qualcomm Life, said wearable data is useful because gives providers a glimpse into what happens to the patient after he or she leaves the hospital, particularly following a surgery. Previously, a patient’s post-hospital activity was essentially a black hole in that the physician had no clue what the patient was doing.

“Now we have a wearable device that has the ability to collect very simple pieces of information,” he said. “Well, guess what? That simple information is way more than what I’ve got right now, ‘cuz I’ve got jack nothing.”

But there’s not buy-in from every physician. One major challenge standing in the way is convincing providers that the data is accurate and reliable.

Consumer engagement poses another problem. Some patients lose interest in wearables, which prevents the provider from gaining access to long-term patterns in their behavior.

“You need retention as well,” Alexis Normand, Nokia’s head of B2B, said. “Lots of our work is on validating the data and on keeping people using them and keeping the engagement.”

Not to mention the privacy and security issues that accompany wearables. Ensuring people have actually consented to what they’re giving away is a major concern among physicians, Normand noted.

But perhaps the biggest issue surrounds the separation between the wearable information and the physician’s workflow. Data from wearables sits in one world, while the episodic care model of the clinical environment is another world.

“Those two worlds don’t map very well,” said Drew Schiller, CEO and cofounder of Validic. “It’s a big challenge. You have to … be able to deliver the right data at the right time and show the information in front of the clinician inside the clinical workflow and then interface with the data.”

Photo: fandijki, Getty Images

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