HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last summer he wanted every American using a wearable health device within four years. A year on, tracking that goal doesn’t appear to have been part of the plan, and the concrete federal follow-through has come mostly through CMS and FDA pilot programs rather than the mass adoption Mr. Kennedy described.
Health system CIOs say that shift in emphasis hasn’t changed their thinking much, because they were never sold on uptake as the right measure of success to begin with.
“Adoption alone does not improve health,” Sunil Dadlani, executive vice president and chief information and digital transformation officer of Morristown, N.J.-based Atlantic Health System, told Becker’s. “The value comes when accurate data is connected to a defined care pathway, an accountable clinical team and a measurable patient outcome, and when this scales at enterprise level beyond pilots.”
Mr. Dadlani said the industry has made some progress on data governance since last year, but not enough to keep pace with the technology itself.
“Advancements in wearable technology continue to outpace the maturity of data governance and clinical validation,” he said, adding that health systems still lack clear standards for data accuracy, patient consent, integration into the medical record, alert thresholds and clinical accountability. “Until those foundations mature, wearable data can create more noise and clinician burden than meaningful clinical value.”
Atlantic Health’s own approach, Mr. Dadlani said, has been “disciplined evaluation rather than broad deployment,” limited to use cases where wearable or remotely generated data addresses a clear clinical need, can be trusted and fits into an accountable care workflow. “Our biggest lesson remains that the care model surrounding the device matters more than the device itself,” he said.
Jason Joseph, chief digital and information officer of Corewell Health, based in Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich., said he isn’t meaningfully more optimistic about the wearables goal than he was a year ago. “This is less a technology challenge and more a question of behavior, incentives and purpose,” he said. “Wearables can provide valuable personal insights, but widespread adoption alone doesn’t necessarily lead to better health outcomes.”
Mr. Joseph said CMS’ ACCESS model, the outcomes-based Medicare payment pilot that launched in July, may support experimentation, but it doesn’t resolve the broader economic question of who pays for wearables among the generally healthy population that Mr. Kennedy’s original goal targeted.
“The gap still largely exists,” he said. “We already have the technical capability to connect devices and ingest wearable data. The bigger challenge is determining what to do with that data, who is responsible for monitoring it, and how it drives better outcomes. Long-term adoption will require both measurable value and reimbursement models that support the work involved.”
Corewell Health has continued to explore targeted use cases over the past year, Mr. Joseph said, but has not pursued a broad-based wearable strategy. “One of the biggest lessons is that technology is not the barrier,” he said. “The challenge is identifying use cases where the data is actionable, creates value for patients and clinicians, and has clear ownership and accountability.”
Darrell Bodnar, CIO of North Country Health in Whitefield, N.H., said he supports wearable use — just not as something Washington mandates.
“I don’t believe the government should be tracking whether Americans own or use wearable devices, nor should their use become an expectation for receiving healthcare services or benefits,” he said.
That said, Mr. Bodnar thinks government does have a role to play in setting standards around safety, privacy, security and appropriate use of the data. “Beyond that, adoption should remain voluntary and a decision between individuals and their healthcare providers,” he said.
“Ultimately, we should measure whether these technologies improve health outcomes, not how many Americans are wearing a device,” he said. “There are probably some benefits, some perceived benefits, and some that have no benefit at all.”
A year in, CIOs’ consensus has held steady even as the federal messaging around it has shifted: Wearables can be useful — narrowly and voluntarily — but counting devices was never the same as improving health.
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