We live in a headline/hyperlinked world. A couple of years back, I learned through happenstance that my most popular blog posts all had catchy titles. I’m pretty confident that people who read my blog do more than scan the titles, but there is so much information coming at us these days, it’s often difficult to get much beyond the headline. Another phenomenon of information overload is that we naturally apply heuristics or shortcuts in our thinking to avoid dealing with a high degree of complexity. Let’s face it: It’s work to think!
In this context, I thought it would be worth talking about two recent headlines that seem to be set backs for the inexorable forward march of connected health. These come in the form of peer reviewed studies, so our instinct is to pay close attention.
In fact, one comes from an undisputed leader in the field, Dr. Eric Topol. His group recently published a paper where they examined the utility of a series of medical/health tracking devices as tools for health improvement in a cohort of folks with chronic illness. In our parlance, they put a feedback loop into these patients’ lives. It’s hard to say for sure from the study description, but it sounds like the intervention was mostly about giving patients insights from their own data. I don’t see much in the paper about coaching, motivation, etc.
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