Taking a Pulse on Wellness Trends

Why does anyone go to visit the doctor? Either they have an acute need, or they are taking an active role in managing their health. Often visiting the doctor is a time to reflect on actions patients take in their daily lives that may be positively or negatively affecting the course of their long-term health.

National checkup

Using this model, let’s check up on the prognosis for prevention and wellness trends in the U.S.

• Over 33 percent of new patient prescriptions are never filled.
• Beyond that, half of patients with chronic conditions cease taking their prescriptions 180 days after they are written, according to the National Institutes of Health.

As these statistics show, there’s much room for improvement. Medication nonadherence remains one noticeable symptom of the larger problem. That said, there’s also a wealth of opportunity. Here’s potential some of the MentorMate team is excited about.

Kyle Simmons, Solutions Architect —

A large opportunity is for someone in the wellness device vertical to make the leap from reactive to proactive. Right now all the gadgets and gizmos pump out HOARDS of data. The best tools are judged upon who has the best dashboard or the most sensors. Yet, all that data is about a single point in time, reacting to the current or past state.  Right now the hope is that seeing past data will inspire a change in future behavior.

I think the exciting next step is when the data allows us to forecast our health, diagnose our issues and become proactive with our behavior — when the quantified self leads to a higher quality self.

Mike Hagan, Associate Creative Director —

We need to create automated tools that can read big data, both old and new (analog or digital) to enhance the patient experience and care through a holistic look at one person’s health and wellness over the span of their life.

We currently live in the divide, where our medical records from the past 5-10 years are online, but any information before that is still sitting in a doctor’s filing cabinet somewhere. This is where a tool could be of use…to quickly scan and translate these analog documents to the digital world. For example, a best case scenario is that someone can use a phone to take a photo of an old patient record and the application is able to programmatically define the information and convert it into the digital space.

If this happens, we can begin to look at a patient’s weight, symptoms, vitals, etc. over a wider timeline and begin to pinpoint problems and health issues that have patterns associated with them, which would lead to a predictive system that humanizes the data.

The ideal software should be equally accessible by both doctors and patients. That way there is no confusion about how the data is being interpreted. It can be a website, an app, a wearable…or all of the above. The more important takeaway from a software perspective is that it should be open sourced and available for iteration as we learn more and technology improves year over year. The more doors we leave open, the easier it will be for us to adapt to future technologies that we may not even know about yet. It’s important that whatever we create is built with adaptability as a key principle.