The Heart Monitor facility at Week Pal and Watch Ch can visit unneeded health care, according to a new study published this week. Only 10 percent of people finally diagnosed with a cardiac condition after a doctor at the Mayo Clinic noticed an abnormal pulse reading on their watch.
The research has shown that home health monitoring devices can lead to overuse of the health care system, said Mayo Clinic Health Ledge Medicine Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, study author Heather Heat. Edge. It can be expensive for patients and for the entire system, and it will unnecessarily take the time of the doctor and the patient.
The Heaton and study team scanned patient health records at every Mayo Clinic site, including Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa, to refer to the term “Apple Pal Watch” over a six-month period from December 2018 to April 2019. Apple came into the window after the introduction of a feature to detect abnormal heart rhythms by Paul and the release of a study looking at how watches can detect atrial fibrillation better.
They found records of 264 patients who said their Apple Pal watches marked heart rhythms. Of that group, 41 explicitly mention receiving a warning from their watch (others may have a warning, but it is not specifically mentioned in their health record). Half of the patients already had a cardiac diagnosis, with 58 previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. About two-thirds had symptoms, including lightheadedness or chest pain.
Only 30 patients in the study made a cardiac diagnosis after visiting their doctors. Most of the heart monitor data were, perhaps, false positives, the study concluded. False positives can cause problems even when the patient is healthy: they can force patients to seek unnecessary health care and cause stress and discomfort. People who do not have symptoms, such as some in this study, may still feel the need to talk to a doctor about an unusual flag on a device such as the Apple Watch.
“It’s hard for a user to ignore a warning that they may have a serious medical condition,” Kirk White, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic and author of the study, said in an email. Edge.
Some of these trends are not new. “Over the years, doctors have been seeing patients coming to their offices for fees after researching medical online medical conditions,” Heaton said. The smartwatch, however, passively monitors people who are not in search of observation. And Paul isn’t the only company that chooses its products as an unusual heart rhythm: Samsung’s Galaxy V Watch Ch3 has an EKG feature, much like the Fitbit Sense smartwatch. While the percentage of people receiving abnormal heart readings on one of these devices may be low (a study by Apple Pal and Watch found that less than 1 percent of users received a warning), millions of people use these products – so there may still be Become thousands of additional people going to thousands of cutters based on them.
These types of products “blur the line between hard-studied medical devices and wellness tools,” Wyatt said. People don’t really understand how well they really do and they really should use it. People who already have a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation, for example, are not supposed to use the Apple Pul Watch feature – but 20 percent of people in the Mayo Clinic study have already made that diagnosis. The symptom is also not used by anyone under the age of 22, but about two dozen people with records in the study were under those cut dozen fatties.
Smartwatches can be useful ways for people to monitor their health at home, but it’s not yet clear what their usefulness might be. Most of the research done on Apple Watch, for example, focuses on how it can detect atrial fibrillation, but it does not really track how it can be used as a screening tool in the context of a health care system. Without that information, doctors like Heaton worry that the devices could cause unnecessary confusion and stress for patients. “It is important to understand the context and the nuances of the disease and this cannot be fully understood by a wearable medical device,” he said.
