How Healthcare Leaders Can Prepare For The Rise Of Wearable Health Monitors

How Healthcare Leaders Can Prepare For The Rise Of Wearable Health Monitors Stanton McComb, Forbes Councils Member

Stanton McComb is the President of McKesson Medical-Surgical.

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I love my Oura ring. For the uninitiated, the Oura ring is a wearable health monitoring device that captures biometric data 24 hours a day—think FitBit for your finger. It tells me more about my personal health than I could have ever imagined even a few years ago. I recently met up with an old friend and fellow of the ring. We shared our affinity for the device and talked about our favorite metrics. This naturally led us to compare our personal health data. And, for the first time since donning the device, I became worried about my health. My friend was clearly sleeping better, and my night-time heart rate variability seemed very low relative to his.

To ease my mind, I needed a more fitting benchmark than my friend who was shorter, younger and, frankly, entirely too fit. I realize now that I had inadvertently slipped into a mild mode of hypochondria. In addition to a better benchmark, I wanted to share my sleep and heart rate data with my primary care physician. The Oura ring makes that simple to do. I could shoot a night’s worth of data to my physician as easily as I could send her a text. And, while some may wish to keep this type of health information private, I was more than eager to get mine in front of my physician.

I’m in the healthcare industry, and we partner with a company that works with physicians to monitor the biometrics of patients who are at a relatively high risk for hospital admission or readmission. So, as I pondered the thought of sharing my Oura data with my doctor, I wondered, what would they even do with this information? Would this be an annoying patient email that she would prefer to avoid? Would she even have benchmark data at her fingertips? Could she store this snapshot of my data in my electronic health record so that we could talk about it during a future visit?

The popularity of wearables like Oura rings, FitBits and Apple Watches is surging. As of 2020, 30% of adults in the United States were using wearable health devices and that number is expected to continue to grow. It also seems our society has become more comfortable talking openly about personal health than ever before. At the same time, the emergence of telemedicine and artificial intelligence signals a moment where more of us want—indeed expect—our physicians to help us quickly make sense of our own digital emissions. The convergence of these advancements and social changes poses quite a few interesting implications on the healthcare industry.

Increasingly, physicians across the U.S. are being reimbursed less for how often they care for us or how many procedures they perform, and more for what they do to keep us healthy and out of the hospital. Biometric data coming from wearables should be able to significantly help physicians achieve this goal and optimize their reimbursements.

Unfortunately, at this precise moment, most physicians are struggling to staff their practices and finish their clinical and administrative tasks from the day. It’s hard to imagine them finding the time or the tools to sift through hundreds of their patients’ wearables data with a high degree of accuracy and responsiveness.

Today, there are many companies that support physicians with remote patient monitoring services, disease management and patient engagement solutions. It will be interesting to see how these companies leverage analytics, empowered by machine learning, to better benchmark biometric data and identify true risks. I believe that these services will become increasingly valuable to all of us, our physicians and, relatedly, our insurers and employers. Indeed, advanced analytics, automated alerts and data-driven patient outreach should help healthcare providers become far more informed and proactive.

In this scenario, patients will generate more biometric emissions and will likely demand interpretative help. Providers will also need affordable, efficient and effective assistance in sifting through and making sense of all of that data. Advances made in machine learning seem poised to meet those demands.

If you are a healthcare leader, here are a few considerations as you prepare for this potential shift:

Review reimbursements. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services currently reimburses physicians for monitoring patients’ vitals remotely. If you are not already familiar with these reimbursement opportunities, you may want to research these independently and then talk to third parties that might help physicians and their patients take advantage of these CMS-supported codes.

Assess existing capabilities. Talk to your electronic health records/practice management software vendor about their abilities and plans to interface with and ingest biometric data from wearables or other more conventional biometric devices, e.g., connected blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, networked scales, etc.

Get feedback from stakeholders. Engage with patients and providers directly to better understand their willingness or hesitation to incorporate wearables into their care management. What nuances need to be considered for your stakeholders?

Start small. Many third-party remote patient monitoring companies allow physician groups to try monitoring with select patient populations. They also allow physicians to set their own customized protocols for when and how they want the remote monitoring company to alert them when a patient’s vitals deviate from some norm.

I believe the growing use of wearables is bound to intersect and impact physician workflows and care models sooner rather than later. Now, whether more patients actually change their behavior and live healthier lives is a question that remains hard to answer. I am just hoping that our interpreted digital emissions will help us all sleep a little easier.

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