Doctors Raise Skepticism About Usefulness of Wearable Medtech

Medical wearables are being touted as the next big medtech trend and as devices that will promote preventative medicine and fitness. But some physicians are beginning to voice their doubts about the usefulness of these devices beyond being mere gimmicks or convenient Christmas presents, according to an article on our sister site, MD+DI Online.

A number of doctors are expressing concerns not only about the usefulness of the data wearable devices like FitBits are collecting, but also about privacy issues that could be sparked by their use, according to the article by MD+DI Online Senior Editor Arundhati Parmar.

One physician, speaking at the recent Partners HealthCare Connected Health Symposium in Boston, dismissed wearable medical devices as little more than trendy holiday gifts that "solve a problem called December."

"Because in December you want to give someone a present and a FitBit is about the right price," said Dr. Robert Pearl, executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, part of Kaiser Permanente, according to a report in Mobile Health News.

Pearl said that recording continuous traces of someone's heart rhythm and keeping that inside a medical record is not information that particularly interests doctors, a notion that should be considered seriously and carefully by designers and developers of new digital health devices and solutions, according to the MD+DI article.

Other physicians also had negative things to say about the data being collected by these devices -- not so much the type of data but the sheer volume of it.

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"The challenge on the clinical side is 'What do I do with the data?'" Ranndy Kellogg, chief operating officer of Omron Healthcare, a wearable developer, told the audience at AdvaMed in San Diego in early October, according to the article. "There's maybe too much data. What is the right data for what I need for that particular patient, that particular consumer? Just because I [as a consumer] can collect the data doesn't mean I need to send it to my doctor."

There are also liability issues with doctors using data from third-party devices that are raising red flags for physicians who worry about possible litigation when using these devices, said Dr. Robert Schwartz, a cardiologist with the Minnesota Heart Institute, in the article.

"There is a big problem with liability," he said. "A patient sends me an EKG with AliveCor and I don't do anything about it and the patient has a problem, am I liable for that?"

Read more about the skepticism physicians are expressing over wearable medical devices in the article, "Top Doc: Wearables Solve a Problem Called December" on the MD+DI website.

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer who has written about technology and culture for more than 15 years. She has lived and worked as a professional journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City. In her free time she enjoys surfing, traveling, music, yoga, and cooking. She currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal.

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