Wearable Devices With Health IT Functions Poised To Disrupt Medicine

The next innovation in health care may come from Silicon Valley.

With Google, Apple and Samsung exploring how to incorporate health IT features into wearable devices, patients may soon provide information to doctors through devices such as smartwatches that can measure and transmit biometric data. Health IT wearables will open a digital conduit so that, for instance, doctors can more readily monitor patients with chronic conditions while also cutting down the need for office visits.

“What’s going to accelerate health as much as anything is consumer devices having [medical] features on them so that we’re continuously collecting this data over a large population of patients,” said Dr. Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and executive director and founder of the USC Center for Body Computing...