During the years I spent trying to understand what was happening with my health before eventually being diagnosed with endometriosis, I accumulated an extraordinary amount of data. Lab results. Imaging reports. Doctor’s notes buried across different patient portals. Pages of symptoms I had tracked myself. The problem wasn’t that the information didn’t exist. It was that no one, including me, could easily see it together. I still wonder whether having a clearer picture of how my health was changing over time would have helped me and my doctors connect the dots sooner. Today, patients have access to more health information than ever before. That’s progress. But it has also exposed the next problem in healthcare:  A patient with access to all their health data can end up with total visibility and zero understanding. 

Increasingly, people are seeking out methods to gain more power over their health data so that they can evaluate changes in real time and not have to wait for an annual physical to understand their health. We see this demand reflected in the steady increase of wearable smart devices like watches, rings, chest straps and patches, which logs data related to the heart, respiratory and metabolic systems, sleep performance and patterns, and more. S. 2% of wearable users shared their data with their clinician. Most people are motivated by a specific end goal they want to attain, symptoms they want to understand and track, a condition or disease they need to better manage, or they are trying to create an early-warning system that can flag metrics that diverge from baseline data.

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