Is The Digital Health Industry About To Fail?

An Open Letter from the GetHealth Team:

"Dear mHealth Industry, Quantified-Self Movement, and Champions of Big Data,
As you are no doubt aware, there has been a recent proliferation of mobile apps, wearable devices, and patient services which allow us to measure and track our daily health behaviors. In a world where so many problems are caused by unhealthy behaviors, the popularity of such products has come to be seen as the future of personal health: the panacea to our chronically unhealthy and overweight society.
We now have access to seamless, reasonably affordable technology that can track how many steps we take, the quality and duration of our sleep, how many calories we burn, and even our blood pressure and mood levels. Never before have we been able to gain such detailed levels of real-time data concerning our health-habits.
This industry operates under the belief that the more aware we are of the details of our daily behaviors, the better position we are in to make the changes necessary to improve our health and lifestyle.
On this view, information is the key to change. The more data we have about how much we move, eat and sleep, the more we can control and alter these numbers to become healthier and happier individuals.
However, while these devices do mark a new and interesting direction for personal health, they fall way short of offering true value to the user as they currently stand."



...keep the data in the background and reveal the insight.

Read more here: http://blog.gethealthapp.com/post/63681783790/why-the-digital-health-industry-is-about-to-fail#.UmKjrBBo_E8..."While I don’t agree that digital health will fail, they make a good point about the need to focus on the result and not the data. Far too many digital health startup companies worry too much about the data and not enough about what people do with the data. It makes sense why. The later is much harder to do. However, that’s also what makes doing the later so much more valuable."