By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD
After absorbing several years of increasingly extravagant promises about the remarkable potential of digital health, investors, physicians, and other stakeholders are now unabashedly demanding: “Show me the data.”
By now, most everyone appreciates the promise of digital health, and understands how, in principle, emerging, patient-focused technologies could help improve care and reduce costs.
The question is whether digital health can actually deliver.
A recent NIH workshop, convened to systematically review the data on digital health, acknowledged, “evidence is sparse for the efficacy of mHealth.”
As Scripps cardiologist Eric Topol and colleagues summarized in JAMA late last year,
“Most critically needed is real-world clinical trial evidence to provide a roadmap for implementation that confirms its benefits to consumers, clinicians, and payers alike.”
What everyone’s asking for now is evidence – robust data, not like the vast majority of wellness studies that experts like Al Lewis and others have definitively shredded.
The goal is to find solid evidence that a proposed innovation actually leads to measurably improved outcomes, or to a material reduction in cost. Not that it could or should, but that it does.
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