Anna Taylor remembers being one of the first people in line to buy the Apple Watch when it debuted in April 2015. She already had a Fitbit step-tracker as part of an employee-sponsored health program that linked step counts to insurance premium reductions. As a data informaticist, she was excited to see what Apple had to offer.
“I hated it,” says Taylor, who is now the associate vice president of population health and value-based care for Washington state-based MultiCare. “It didn’t give me the data I wanted to manage, and I didn’t like the graphical user interface.” However, much has changed in the world of wearables since then.
MultiCare is now using Apple Watch to gather data from patients in its cardiac rehabilitation program. (The device can provide heart rate and heart rhythm notifications and received regulatory clearance as an electrocardiogram monitor.) What’s more, wearables have moved from being strapped to the wrist to being embedded in clothing. That boosts their potential to support remote care, including as part of home healthcare initiatives.
At the same time, the evolution of devices — and the real-time availability of data from them — can leave organizations scrambling to manage information, software integrations and security settings. With both clinical and IT staff experiencing burnout, that can be a tall order.
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