Sure You Can Track Your Health Data, But Can Your Doctor Use It? : Shots - Health News People use wearable gadgets and phone apps to monitor their health — everything from calories consumed to medication taken. But all that data doesn't necessarily translate into better health care.


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And I'm David Greene. Good morning. Today in Your Health, a new procedure to help maintain weight loss, but first - wearable technology; maybe some of you have been trying it out. These are gadgets that collect health information, everything from how much exercise we're getting to how stressed we are to how many calories we're consuming. The aim of these products is to transform health care in much the same way Amazon took on traditional book publishing. So let's hear how doctors are reacting. Here's Amy Standen, from member station KQED, in San Francisco.

AMY STANDEN, BYLINE: Let's be clear here that Dr. Paul Abramson is no technophobe. There's the hydraulic standing desk from Denmark and the stethoscope with a data screen.

PAUL ABRAMSON: I'm both an engineer and I'm in health care and I like gadgets.

STANDEN: Abramson is a primary care doctor in San Francisco, where he sees patients from the tech industry. And more and more, he says, people are coming in with data collected from consumer medical devices; sometimes, a lot of data.

ABRAMSON: Everything from heart rate to symptoms to medications to a variety of things.

STANDEN: Like the patient who came in with pages and pages of Excel spreadsheets.

ABRAMSON: The thought of going through it and trying to analyze it or extract meaning from it was not really feasible.

STANDEN: To Anderson, the spreadsheets just didn't say all that much.

ABRAMSON: I get information from watching people's body language, from observing their minor tics and their tone of their voice.

STANDEN: Subtleties you just can't get from a Fitbit or some kind of health app, but despite any reluctance on the part of doctors, technology startups are actively trying to insert their products into the doctor's office. Michael Blum, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says he gets pitches from entrepreneurs almost daily.

MICHAEL BLUM: Their perspective is, you know, you old doctors have kept things the same as they are for 50 years. We've got new technology and it's going to disrupt health care.

STANDEN: Don't get him wrong here - Blum says health care needs a high-tech update, for sure. Doctors can benefit from more granular data about how their patients are doing. The problem is just because a device looks shiny and new doesn't mean it works. Fitbits and Apple Watches aren't regulated by the FDA.

BLUM: We can't make the leap that just because this data's coming in digitally it's accurate. We can't make that leap. We have to do the validation studies.

STANDEN: And often that task falls to doctors and hospitals. At UCSF, Blum now heads an entire new department created to sort out which technologies are game changing and which are dead ends, and other health care groups are following suit. It means running pilot studies, giving devices to people with illnesses and seeing whether they help.

BRET PARKER: When I heard that there was a trial that involved a wearable that would help me better manage my symptoms and my condition, I said to myself, well, that's a pretty cool thing. I've got to try that.

STANDEN: Bret Parker, who lives in New York City, has Parkinson's disease, and because there is no cure for Parkinson's, his attitude, for a long time, was to ignore it.

PARKER: My feeling was don't worry about things that you can't control and that aren't affecting you that badly. I'd rather just, in a sense, just live my life and not think about it.

STANDEN: But as his disease has progressed, that's changed. It's become important to pay attention to small details, like are the tremors worse when Parker gets less sleep or eats differently or takes his medicine at a certain time of day? So the pilot study he's taking part in looks at whether a wearable activity tracker, made by Intel, can answer those kinds of questions by picking up and creating a digital diary of his tremors day and night.

PARKER: This is going to be a battle between me and the Parkinson's over the years to come. And as it advances it means I've got to be better and smarter at my role in it. You know, it's one thing to be passive when it's not a big deal. I'm going to have to be more active is the condition gets worse.

STANDEN: The results of this Parkinson's pilot are due later this year. It's one in a slew of studies to see whether consumer health tools will amount to more than just trendy gadgets. For NPR News, I'm Amy Standen in San Francisco.

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