Lots of people know they could be eating more greens, sleeping better, and getting in more cardio.
The problem is what to do with all that data now that people have real information about themselves, courtesy of wearable medical and health devices. And, moreover, identifying the exact behavior we need to change—and then actually altering it.
Patrick Sheehan, vice president of value-based care at intelligent health devices company Withings, said wearable devices that measure the user’s health data have become “the cop on your wrist.”
“It’s an accountability driver,” said Sheehan, who spoke at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen this month. “It doesn’t solve problems for you, but it tells you your problems.”
The whole market, added Sheehan, is stuck at this surface-level issue, naming problems instead of resolving them. The solution isn’t another sensor attached to a different device.
“The wearable paired with the action or an intervention is solving a problem,” said Sheehan.
Ann Crady Weiss, CEO and co-founder of Hatch, which builds bedside consumer devices for adults and babies to improve sleep, has observed the same issue up close.
“Data, in and of itself, is interesting, but making it actionable is really, really important,” she said. Getting someone to act, Crady Weiss argued, is just as much a problem of habit as much as it is technical.
She said Hatch’s rivals for a bedtime audience aren’t other sleep apps, but rather “Netflix and TikTok.” In her view, the way to resolve the issue is to get “someone interested and looking forward to taking care of themselves.”
Nele Jessel, Chief Medical Officer at healthcare records data firm athenahealth, said the gap between data and what to do with it has to be the first step in a path to more empowered decision making about health.
“Turning data and information into knowledge is the first step,” Jessel said, because on its own, “data and information is just that, it’s random facts.” The harder leap, Jessel said, is the one from knowing something to doing something about it, which is often where most consumer health tools stall.
But knowing hardly ever equates to doing, which raises a further issue. If a device has already flagged a problem, whose job is it to fix the behavior underlying it?
Lisa Shah, chief medical officer of chronic conditions company Twin Health, argued the industry has been blaming the wrong party. The assumption that people don’t care about their health, she said, is a bias her work has almost thoroughly debunked.
“The biggest bias that’s been busted for me is that the patients don’t care about their health. That’s garbage,” said Shah. “What they don’t have is how.”
That “how,” she said, has to be tailored to a person’s actual life. A sleep target that assumes a 9 p.m. bedtime isn’t useful to shift workers, she noted.
“What is a nurse going to do if I tell you to go to bed at 9:00 and that’s when you start your shift?” she questioned.
The fix, in her view, is to make the guidance specific, available at “the average sixth grade reading level,” and small enough to actually stick.
“It’s micro changes, guys,” said Shah. The goal isn’t a total reinvention of someone’s habits, but a single realistic adjustment they’ll keep.
According to Sheehan however, the real change doesn’t need to come from patients.
“Patients are not going to inherently change their behaviors,” said Sheehan. “I think it’s physician behavior change.”
Getting doctors and clinicians to act on the readings to screen for conditions and warning signs earlier, diagnose issues sooner, and adjust treatment based on data is key—rather than letting the data pile up unused.
Jessel noted that doctors are often the bottleneck for a functional reason. Providers are often “leery of being presented with data that they can do nothing about,” she said.
For Othman Laraki, co-founder of virtual cancer clinic Color Health, the answer is a reward. Continuous glucose monitors work, he said, by “giving people a reward system for good behavior.” That might be a quiet nudge to sleep earlier or skip a salty or sweet snack because the readout will expose it either way. Laraki said he learned that information the hard way about his own food choices.
“I was very sad to see that Pho was one of them,” he said, referring to foods that spiked his glucose level.
Beyond wearables and health gadgets, inconsistencies and lack of access to getting medical care persist for large swaths of the population.
Jen Shepherd, who runs Uber Health, argued that the focus with tailored data misses where most people actually get hampered.
“Insights, and more insights, are wonderful, and we have more health insights now than we have ever,” she said, “but honestly, the gap to access to care is so large.”
The barriers that derail people from being more informed about their health are rooted in issues such as affordability, transportation, and food.
Those reasons are why “one in five patients delay or miss appointments,” she added. “Me handing out wearables is not going to solve most of that problem,” Shepherd said.
For some patients, the data deficit is more fundamental. Heidi Davis, founder of perimenopause health company Peri, said the entire system was “designed by men for men,” leaving women with far less relevant health research and less-informed answers.
When women do seek help, she said, “70% of women that go and ask for help get no help and get sent home.” For them, the value of data is that it’s a bargaining chip.
“Here’s the data, now you can go in, you can advocate for yourself.”
