Canadian Health Big Data Hold Big Potential
Technology leverages ‘the body as information’
Did you know that your body is a vast source of health data?
It is. From your resting heart rate throughout the day to the number of steps you take, these data may be captured, processed and analyzed. The result – called “the body as information” – can help you and help health organizations, too.
A variety of devices exist which can capture these data. Typically worn, these tiny computers – called activity trackers – can measure your heart rate over time, the duration and type of activities you perform and the calories you burn. And at the end of the day your device can go to bed with you but will not rest: it will measure the duration and quality of your sleep.
Activity trackers pair with mobile apps which process the data captured. The resulting information is displayed in graphical and tabular format on smartphones. Some of the data and information may be uploaded to the fitness tracker manufacturer’s server – the cloud.
Ubiquitous computing
It’s all part of computers being made smaller, less expensive and more mobile. Together with what could be considered an insatiable appetite for health applications, the demand for activity trackers has grown considerably in the past few years.
“We’re in the midst of a revolution in personal health, thanks in large part to consumers’ enthusiasm for wearable fitness activity trackers,” said Shawn DuBravac, then chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, in a statement.
“Our [research] results show these devices are having a positive impact on owners’ health by encouraging them to be more aware and active,” he added.
The smart aspect of wearable devices is that they provide what is known as context awareness or context sensitivity: the ability to combine measurements of wearer activity with a certain degree of awareness of their physiologic state or surrounding situation. This allows physiologic parameters to be related to wearer activity.
Together with other health apps and miniature or wearable devices, they comprise what is known as digital health.
The devices and mobile apps of digital health generally fall into three categories, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal: fitness trackers; real-time monitoring systems – to track vitals of those with chronic conditions; and aging-in-place ones – to improve safety for seniors continuing to live in their homes.
Applications
The data generated by activity trackers are used by organizations as well as individuals.
Boston-based insurer John Hancock, a subsidiary of Canada’s Manulife Financial company, began handing out activity trackers in 2015 to new life insurance policyholders. Those policyholders saw up to a 15% reduction in their premiums. Should adequate levels of physical activity – or the healthy lifestyle assumed by the lower premiums – not be maintained the discount was to be lost.
In 2016 John Hancock parent Manulife Financial announced it will begin the same program in Canada.
“Manulife is changing the whole notion of life insurance,” said president and chief executive officer Marianne Harrison in a statement.
“Until today, Canadians purchasing life insurance filled out an application, paid their premium and eventually their family makes a claim,” she added.
“Manulife is now actively partnering with customers who want to achieve physical and financial health and overall wellbeing.”
All this has the potential to change the way health, not just life, insurance, is offered. Traditionally, health care data were captured, processed – and retained – by medical clinics, hospitals and either health insurance companies or provincial health insurance plans. The idea that extensive health data on a personal level may be generated, captured, processed and reported by individuals themselves – with help from activity tracker manufacturers – is a game-changer. The extensiveness of the data, with their context sensitivity, is apt to change the way health insurance operates.
Actionable data
Perhaps the most ambitious – and technically sophisticated – application of activity trackers is not actually of them but of their data. A Calgary-based company named Vivametrica has developed an analytics platform for them.
Hailing its product as “a first of its kind analytics platform for wearable healthcare,” the company, launched in 2014, says it is “bridging the gap between wearable fitness applications and actionable data for consumers, enterprises, healthcare and researchers.”
Vivametrica says the massive amount of data generated by activity trackers presents a huge opportunity for leveraging them to create meaningful health care decisions. Vivametrica’s analysis is based on years of comprehensive clinical findings in the fields of physical activity, rehabilitation and medicine
“When the wearable market took off, the need to put all this data to good use became apparent,” Vivametrica co-founder and chief executive officer Dr. Richard Hu, a clinical professor of surgery at the University of Calgary, said in a statement.
“Our goal in pioneering a standardized platform is to create a new approach to healthcare by bringing data together in a meaningful and actionable way,” he added.
Vivametrica’s target market is not activity tracker wearers but organizations such as insurance carriers, health care providers and employee health and wellness programs.
Governments as big data repositories
An abundance of data is captured by the Canadian health care system.
Medical clinics and hospitals keep records of procedures performed on health care consumers, diagnoses, referrals to specialist physicians and medical test results.
Canadian provincial health insurance plans, in particular, are repositories of vast health care consumption data due to being the single payers of the system.
A Canadian federal government agency known as the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) regularly analyses sets of these data.
Created in 1994, CIHI “provides comparable and actionable data and information that are used to accelerate improvements in health care, health system performance and population health across Canada,” according to its web site.
CIHI reports are used by managers at all levels of the Canadian health care system to plan and manage the delivery of health services. They are used by government ministries of health, too, and are routinely quoted in the media.
All due to the capture, processing and analyzing of Canadian consumption data. And although those data are increasingly captured electronically, this capture has been going on for decades.
Canada may well be a health data analyst’s paradise, with the data available from digital health devices, health care organizations and provincial health insurance plans. Certainly, the potential exists for these big data to help Canadian individuals, health care organizations and the health care system itself.
Your body as information never looked so good.
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