Apple Watches, Oura rings and Fitbits are more than trendy tech devices. They are shifting the health care landscape as we know it. And Baton Rouge doctors predict wearable health monitoring devices will become more mainstream in 2025.
“Everyone who wears an Apple Watch is wearing an oxygen monitor on their wrist right now,” Dr. Curtis Chastain, director of Our Lady of the Lake Men’s Health Center and executive wellness program, says. “The problem is it’s not tied to me. That’s where the connection has to happen.”
Dr. Kenneth Civello, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at Our Lady of the Lake, has been monitoring his patients’ conditions remotely via wearable health monitoring devices for 10 years. Some of the most frequently used devices include Apple Watches to measure electrocardiograms, or EKGs, and Kardia, a smart device that does the same and generates detailed data on the patient’s heart function that can be shared with the patient’s physician. Other commonly recommended technologies are blood pressure monitors and cuffs, wireless scales, and blood glucose monitoring devices.
While some of these devices have been on the consumer market for years, Civello says the health care system has been slow to adapt to them.
“All of this wearable information becomes a data avalanche for the doctor,” Civello says.
Around 2017, Our Lady of the Lake started using a custom-built digital platform that provides physicians with a dashboard of patient results from wearable health monitoring devices. COVID-19 accelerated the implementation of remote monitoring so health care professionals could keep more patients at home and out of the hospital. Since then, there has been an explosion of new remote patient monitoring dashboards, Civello says.
These dashboards help notify physicians when a patient has concerning health conditions such as high blood pressure, irregular heartbeats, high glucose or low oxygen levels. When patients’ data are flagged in red, their health care team knows to contact the patient to identify the next steps.
While the wearable health monitoring devices don’t eliminate doctor visits, they can help decrease the amount of time spent in the hospital for some patients. That will lead to better health outcomes, Civello says. He anticipates more collaborative intelligence like wearable devices and dashboards will become the new norm, saving insurance companies and patients money for unnecessary hospital stays.
Chastain and Civello predict that this year, more patients likely will rely on direct-to-consumer disease treatments such as wearable health monitoring devices, online platforms providing remote care and cash-driven imaging centers that provide bloodwork and testing without having to wait for insurance approval.
“It’s hard for health care to move quickly with technology and that has a lot to do with HIPPA laws and sharing of information,” Civello says. “There are a lot of roadblocks. As those barriers lower and technology gets better, we will be able to process the data coming in and make better medical decisions in the future.”
