Wearables have become an important part of digital health solutions. These smart devices provide the first window of contact between providers and patients while ensuring on-the-go health solutions for both parties. The preference for mobile cardiac monitoring services is growing rapidly as a result, with the wearables heart monitoring devices market exhibiting an impressive CAGR that’s just shy of 16%. But is it just a fad or are wearables truly make a difference in healthcare? Let’s find out as we dissect the role of wearables in improving patient engagement and cardiac care outcomes.

• Wearables Empower Shared Decision Making

Approximately 60% of patients say healthcare providers could do better with their patient engagement strategies. The good news is that over 83% of patients are willing to do what it takes to improve their engagement.

Wearables are a great strategy to boost patient engagement. They keep patients involved by giving them access to their health data. Otherwise, when patients are locked out of this data or don’t get the full information, they cannot be fully engaged.

Mobile heart performance monitoring services don’t just provide data access but also ensure specialist assistance to provide patient education. As patients understand their data better, they can take on more informed and active roles in the decision-making phases of their care process.

• Mobile Technology Improves Diagnostic Accuracy For Arrhythmias

Wearable technology is also the next step of evolution as far as boosting diagnostic accuracy is concerned. This occurs due to the following features that are commonly associable with most wearable healthcare technologies:

• Remote data access
• Real Time monitoring
• 24/7 data recording
• Patient customization

Additionally, wearables also accelerate the personalization of healthcare, which means more positive health outcomes due to addressing bespoke medical needs.

• Wearables Reduce The Risk Of Hospitalization

The conventional care model is typically episodic and reactive. Patients seek medical care in response to adverse events, instead of the other way around. Wearables flip the scales, setting the pace for proactive care that gets ahead of the problems.

Real-time, continuous heart health monitoring ensures the early detection of important thresholds and symptoms that could hint at the patient’s condition taking a turn for the worse. Care teams can therefore provide medical intervention well ahead of adverse events, thus lowering the risk of hospitalization and rehospitalization. Moreover, wearables also achieve this by incentivizing behavior from the patient’s perspective.

• Improved Post-Discharge Care Tracking For Heart Failure

Over 6.5 million Americans have experienced heart failure, with many of these cases recurrent. Proper post-care strategies are therefore key to monitoring the symptoms to ensure the patient is progressing normally.

Wearables also improve post-discharge care for heart failure victims by enabling physicians to never lose sight of any heartbeat.  Physicians can rely on wearable technology to:

• Get a better understanding of patient stability over time
• Determine improvements or regressions post-discharge
• Provide home-based monitoring and patient education

All without affecting the patient’s day-to-day, courtesy of non-intrusive and lightweight designs that patients can keep up with for days- or even weeks- on end.

• Wearables Improve Engagement Through Patient Participation

Wearable technology improves patient engagement in several ways. One way is by giving patients more active roles to play in the care process. For instance, patients under monitoring for suspected heart arrhythmias can trigger data recording by pushing buttons on certain devices.

Wearables are usually one component of a larger cardiac monitoring ecosystem of technology. When paired with the right solutions, these wearables can also serve as communication pivots or channels between patients and healthcare providers. The latter can easily follow up on post-discharge care, with some wearable devices even able to receive alerts and reminders for medication, patient appointments, and other important events.

• Wearables Can Better Pick Out Asymptomatic Heart Conditions

Not all heart arrhythmias or problems manifest with clear symptoms for the patient. Considering the case of Afib or Atrial Fibrillation, for example, over 33% of cases occur without symptoms, making it even harder to diagnose.

Wearables are essential in such cases and help to track the heart’s electrical activity for a much longer period of time, thus bringing to light subtle deviations that aren’t usually apparent with one medical checkup. Consequently, there’s improved heart health in terms of:

• Reduced risk of SCD or sudden cardiac death
• Lowering the possibility of strokes
• Reduced deterioration of heart tissue, etc.

Additionally, patients can also start on an appropriate treatment or management plan early as a result.

Wearables Take Care Quality To A Whole New Level

As you can see, wearables are not just a fad with passing delight. They present real medical applications that advance cardiac care outcomes while also improving patient activation and engagement. The time is right to start implementing mobile cardiac monitoring services to serve the needs of the modern healthcare patient. Get started today by visiting the Cardiac Rhythm website for cardiac monitoring services.