We’re entering an era where the patient has more data on his or her health than the physician. Thanks to incredible advances in consumer health technology, we can now easily track everything from how much we exercise to what we eat, how well we sleep or how stressed out we feel. Our technology helps us manage our health.
Wearable devices and smartphone apps have opened new doors to measuring our day-to-day lifestyle choices and activities. We can use this technology and the data it provides to feel better, look better and even prevent disease or illness.
In our previous blog post, Centralizing Your Medical Records, we looked at the first of five core principles of the Heads Up Health software:
- Centralizing your medical records
- Using technology to self-manage
- Improving health through better understanding of your data
- Sharing data across your care team
- Taking your health data with you wherever you go
In this post, we continue our series on the vision for Heads Up Health’s software by looking at how it integrates consumer health technology. This integration can help you intelligently manage your health and transform the way you look at your healthcare analytics.
Your Healthcare Bank Account
Imagine checking your bank account at the end of the year with no information on individual transactions. Just a single number that shows your ending balance.
You’d probably be scratching your head because you’d have no idea where your money went or how to adjust your spending habits. Any attempts to figure out how you arrived at your final balance would probably involve a lot unreliable guesswork, especially since there’s quite a few studies that show that the human brain has limited memory space and can even trick itself into thinking false memories are real memories.
A once-a-year bank statement is kind of like an annual visit to your doctor. You get the final balance but have no way to quantify how you got there. Maybe your weight went up 10 pounds. Maybe your blood pressure has ticked up, and your cholesterol is higher. Maybe you also tell the doctor you’ve been feeling sluggish, not sleeping well and you’re generally stressed out at work.
Now imagine if you had detailed transaction records for your health, just like we have detailed transaction records for our bank accounts. You could easily begin to quantify your lifestyle and make adjustments to improve your health. With the right tools, your short-term and long-term physical health could be managed just like your bank account.
Heads Up Health helps you track all of your health transactions in one place, so you have a complete record of what’s happening in your body. Considering that chronic diseases make up 70 percent of deaths in the U.S. and that most of them are preventable, having an accurate method of managing your health data over time is a powerful tool.
Optimizing Consumer Health Technology with Heads Up Health
Heads Up Health is designed to help you leverage technology to manage your health in two ways:
- Centralizing the data
For all the promise of consumer health technology, one of the major challenges is integrating all of the data in one place. Scales, activity trackers, mobile apps, glucometers and other health devices each maintain a portion of your data in a different location. What’s needed is an integrated health dashboard that can manage all this information in one place.
Heads Up Health solves this problem.
The software integrates data from all the leading consumer health technologies. Connecting your devices and apps into your Heads Up account is as simple as signing into your online bank. For devices and apps that don’t have a supported connection, we support uploading data through CSV files or simply entering the data manually.
Heads Up Dashboard
- Integrating the data with your medical records
In addition to centralizing healthcare analytics, it’s equally important to see that data alongside your medical records. Are my nutritional changes really lowering my cholesterol? Is exercise really lowering my blood sugar? Are my lifestyle changes improving my thyroid function? The only way to answer these questions is if we compare our lifestyle data (which we collect from consumer health technology) with the data in our medical records.
There are solutions on the market to help aggregate lifestyle data from health devices and apps. There are other solutions on the market that can help you centralize your medical records. However, at Heads Up we believe the complete solution needs to include both.
Tracking blood sugar in Heads Up Health
Get Started!
Consumer health devices are quickly becoming highly sophisticated and clinically relevant. The data is also becoming increasingly easy to collect. Heads Up Health is here to help you manage that data, and transform your health. If you’re interested in seeing all your healthcare analytics in one spot, sign up for the beta version of Health Up Health. Or, if you want to stay up-to-date with the latest healthcare, fitness and wellness trends, follow us on Twitter or find us on Facebook.
