The company that connects your fitness tracker with your doctor
The increased adoption and sophistication of digital health technology is revolutionizing the patient healthcare experience. As more and more of us purchase fitness devices and connected scales, it is becoming increasingly important to make good use of the stream of data churned out by these devices, and to make this data available to our physician.
This is where a company called Validic steps in. If you’ve ever sent your doctor data from your Fitbit, smart scale, glucose meter or another wearable device or health tracker, it is very likely Validic was involved. The company’s core focus is providing a one-to-many connection that allows healthcare companies to access mobile and digital health data across devices and platforms.
Validic is essentially a cloud-based technology platform that connects patient-recorded data from digital health applications, devices and wearables to key healthcare companies like hospital systems, providers, pharmaceutical companies, payers, health information technology platforms, health clubs and wellness companies. The company collects data from more 270 million health and fitness devices. Some 223 million people across the world have agreed to let the North Carolina-based startup monitor their fitness and wellbeing.
Validic’s customers include Kaiser Permanente, whose doctors are keeping tabs on diabetes patients; insurance companies for companies; electronic medical record companies, wellness companies and pharmaceutical companies.
“We’re powering any healthcare organization that’s looking to learn more about the patient and really connect the dots in between individual visits,” Validic co-founder and CTO Drew Schiller told Fortune.
Validic doesn’t monitor patients itself. Rather, it just acts as a conduit and dashboard by uploading the data into its cloud, where healthcare professionals can review it with the rest of a patient’s health vitals. This means that physicians dont even need to know which tracking devices patients are using – Validic takes care of that side of the equation.
Validic is one of the companies chosen by the Obama administration this year to contribute to its ambitious $200 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to detect patterns among genetic markers and other factors in order to develop disease cures.
The goal is to look for correlations between a person’s genomic data, fitness patterns and vital signs. “We’ll be able to find trends among patients that we never even thought of before,” Schiller says.
Essential reading: The ‘wearable’ future of healthcare
As wearable technology becomes less expensive, more powerful, and data quality improves, wearable devices will soon become an integral part of the healthcare system. It will take time, though, before they become truly part of every doctor and hospital. But thanks to advances in technology, we can expect a future in which our connected devices keep our doctor up to speed on all aspects of our health and fitness.
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