GE Healthcare teams up with AliveCor to make it easier for physicians to incorporate wearable data into their care plans

The news: GE Healthcare partnered with AliveCor to let physicians easily view and analyze the result of their patient’s electrocardiogram (EKG) recorded via AliveCor’s FDA-cleared EKG device, KardiaMobile, per a company press release.

Here’s how it works: EKG data captured from a KardiaMobile device will be automatically shared with GE’s Muse Cardiac Management software—which is already integrated into most electronic health records (EHRs).

• GE’s algorithms analyze EKGs to help inform a physician’s interpretation, looking for signs of heart conditions like arrhythmia.
• Physicians can also pull up a patient’s previous EKG results and compare them with a new reading, per GE Healthcare.

The bigger picture: The ability to integrate EKG data directly into an EHR could make doctors’ lives easier. However, patients aren’t satisfied with medical wearables’ UX, and that’s limiting their desire to use devices like AliveCor’s.

Most physicians are burdened with heavy admin work within their EHRs, so it’s highly valuable to have a new digital health platform that’s already integrated within their EHR system.

• For example, unlike the Apple Watch (also FDA-cleared for patient-recorded EKGs), AliveCor’s wearable device doesn’t simply share a PDF with the physician—it goes a step further and incorporates the data into their EHR system.

However, while better EHR integration is good news for overworked physicians, that doesn’t necessarily mean consumers will find Alivecor’s wearable easier to use.

• Most (85%) healthcare consumers complain that medical wearables have poor usability, leading to many (54%) recording inaccurate data into their device due to confusion, per Software Advice’s recent survey of 450 US patients that were prescribed wearables.

What’s next? Going forward, we could see clinicians and medical wearables developers like AliveCor and Withings double down on support for patients with poor tech literacy.

Consumers want more support and training around how to actually used their device, they don't want to be left to figure it out themselves:

• About 67% of medical wearable users say they want to contact a help desk or support team for issues with their device, followed by 54% of users who would opt for an in-person tutorial on how to operate their wearable—ranking higher than consumers who wanted a library of resources to troubleshoot themselves (26%), per Software Advice data.