The Patient Equation

3Fitbits, Smart Toilets, and a Bluetooth-enabled Self-driving ECG

We looked in the previous chapter at the medical and life sciences implications of digital data. And yet, when we examine the world right now, it seems like there's a lot of hype about what we might call the nonclinical applications of sensor technology—or, perhaps even more to the point, the aspiring-to-be-clinically-useful-but-not-quite-there-yet applications. Full of promise and potential—and clever marketing—but, at the end of the day, as surgeon and writer Dr. Atul Gawande told economist and author Tyler Cowen in an interview, “it's a dump of a ton of data that a clinician is supposed to use and know how to integrate into practice, [but the information] hasn't been able to be used in such a way [that it's] actually demonstrating major improvements in people's outcomes.”¹

We're at this in-between stage in the technology. The wearables market is undeniably huge—forecasted by one advisory firm to be over $34 billion by the time this book is in print²—and yet…we're still very much at the beginning of fulfilling the promise of multivariate patient equations changing the way we diagnose and treat most conditions.

In addition, there have been high-profile mistakes (Theranos, IBM's Watson, and Verily's glucose-sensing contact lens, to name three that we'll talk about more in just a bit) that make it far too easy to write off the entire category of highly-hyped “digital breakthroughs” in medicine. In this chapter, ...