Wearable health data overloads doctors, creating a new challenge for healthcare

Cardiologist Dr. David Kao is used to patients walking into appointments armed with data from their wearables. One Wednesday morning in late May was no different: a patient showed him stats from her smart band that she was worried about.

"Probably 70% of it, I just don't know what to do with clinically, because it's all been made up by the company," said Kao, who is an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "And then there were like two things that were incredibly useful that we would not have had if she wasn't wearing her [device]." Scenes like this one have been playing out across the country for more than a decade as patients and doctors struggle to handle the glut of metrics produced by wearable technology. "You just get this fire hose of all this different kind of information," Kao said.

"Usually you have to look up some of it to even have a remote idea of how to comment on it, and there's not a way to digitally summarize or support a clinician in understanding what to do with any of that." More than 30% of adults in the US own a fitness or wellness wearable, according to a report from data platform Statista. As these devices have proliferated, so has the sheer amount of metrics about the people wearing them. Heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns, stress, pulse oxygen, and more.

While wearables are often marketed with big promises of how data can lead to a healthier, more optimized life, the reality is far more complicated for the patients and doctors who want to figure out what these insights mean and how to use them. Unless you have a chronic condition or an annual checkup, odds are you only visit the doctor when something happens. In an era of wearable health devices, an episodic care system isn't structured to accommodate an ongoing stream of health data.

"As much as the physicians do believe in its utility, their systems, their infrastructure, and the resources that they have, including time and staffing, aren't set up to receive and make use of that data," said Ream Shoreibah, teaching associate professor of marketing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Shoreibah is on a team of researchers who published a recent report in The Journal of Consumer Affairs exploring the challenges that exist among patients, their data, and doctors. One key issue they highlighted is integrating wearable data into patients' electronic health records, or EHRs.

Absorbing wearable data into an EHR is hard for a variety of reasons. For one, the process requires two separate clouds owned by two big companies to talk with each other. There also has to be a way to guarantee that patient data from a wearable makes it into the correct person's EHR, said Dr.

Ida Sim, professor of medicine at the University of San Francisco, as well as computational precision health at UCSF and the University of California, Berkeley. "All of that is just a Wild, Wild West," she said. But even when wearable data could be quickly and easily ported into an EHR, Sim said, even now, providers are managing myriad accounts and logins for different proprietary platforms required to view the data, which might not even be presented in the same format.