Motivation

Healthcare providers cannot manage many of the digital health products on the market.

Over the past two decades, the advent of mobile devices, consumer machine learning applications, and the accompanying rise of internet of things technology led to an explosion in the supply of digital health products. These range applications from fitness tracking to heart failure monitoring. The continued growth of innovation in the field, coupled with the optimistic prospects of technologies enabling passive prevention and tracking of chronic disease, mean that the industry and its products will continue to become more ubiquitous.

Yet, the ability of digital health technologies to truly be leveraged will be limited to providers’ own ability to use such technology. Although 68% of physicians believe digital health technologies can improve lifestyle, and 64% say that digital health can track effective treatments, digital health data, which is otherwise usable for improving care plans, is difficult to aggregate in one place that physicians can easily see. Simply put, while an individual patient can keep track of several apps for oneself, a healthcare provider does not have time to do the same for each individual patient.

The inability of health care providers to dedicate time to assessing digital health data for enhancing care may also play a role in limiting patients’ own leveraging of digital health products. Although machine learning processes promise to use collected data to generate insights, the expertise of human care providers could be useful in making meaningful lifestyle changes based on collected data.