Paduda: Research on Wearable Tech: It's the Data, Too

Wednesday, July 26, 2023 | 0

Two recently published peer-reviewed studies give more insight into the utility and effectiveness of wearables/digital health.

Joe Paduda

Key takeaway: Digital health will affect care management and patient recovery in ways we are just beginning to grasp. 

One study examined 864 patients’ use of Plethy’s Recupe program.

Top takeaway: The better a patient’s mood, the lower his pain level and the more he complies with exercise programs. While correlation is not causation, the connection between mood and recovery is clear.

While this may be obvious, the real takeaway is wearable technology can be an early warning system, giving caregivers and other stakeholders (claims adjusters, care managers) real-time insight into their patients’ mood and pain levels.

Instead of waiting for the practitioner’s notes, reading and interpreting them and (hopefully) determining the patient’s mood and pain level, wearable tech can alert caregivers and case managers to potential recovery-delaying issues and intervene before problems become entrenched.

Digital health — specifically, a wearable sensor plus Recupe app — is also associated with strong adherence to a home exercise program, significant decreases in pain and improvements in range of motion. This descriptive study looked at total knee arthroplasty patients, finding, “Recupe patients recovered to lower pain levels with fewer patient visits and health care utilization [than reported by other published information].”

What does this mean for you?

Taken together, these studies show digital health’s effects are broad indeed. The instant access to key data points can help stakeholders quickly respond to patients’ needs and issues.

Disclosure: Plethy is a Health Strategy Associates consulting client.

Joseph Paduda is co-owner of CompPharma, a consulting firm focused on improving pharmacy programs in workers’ compensation. This column is republished with his permission from his Managed Care Matters blog.