Should everyone be monitoring their health?

HealthMaker Mark Smith, MD, president of the California Healthcare Foundation, thinks a lot of experts overestimate the number of patients who are obsessed with health data. In this video, he explains the limitations of constant health monitoring.

Transcript

00:00

My sense actually is that a lot of people in health care and particularly health care IT overestimate the extent to which patients

00:09

want to constantly monitor their health. [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:17

My sense is that there will always be a few people who are intensely interested in those things. My sense is it's not a huge portion of the population

00:27

and not likely to get a lot bigger. I may be completely wrong about this, but my sense actually is that a lot of people

00:35

in health care and particularly health care IT overestimate the extent to which patients

00:41

want to constantly monitor their health. My patients all have HIV. I don't want them checking their CD4 count every day

00:50

or even every week. It's not relevant. It's not helpful. They have lives to get on with. So the notion that even people with chronic disease

00:58

would be obsessed with their sugar levels or doesn't strike me as particularly feasible or even

01:06

desirable. So for a healthy 26-year-old triathlete marathoner to want to monitor their heart rate 10 hours a day,

01:16

that's your hobby. That's fine. My sense is we now have all these new tools and we

01:23

haven't yet figured out how to use them in ways that are useful and practical , so this strikes me as an interesting

01:31

thing for some people. We're still struggling to try to figure out just how much-- how accurately do we need

01:37

to know your blood pressure. How many times a day do we need to know it. And we now have all these wonderful new tools

01:44

and technology and in health care as frankly in so many other areas, we sometimes have to rattle around for a while

01:50

to figure out not just what you can do but what you should do or what you want to do that can be useful. And it strikes me that our increasing capacity

02:00

to do real-time constant physiological monitoring is in that category of, gee, It's a neat thing to do now.

02:07

Where would it really be useful to go that far? [AUDIO LOGO]