Seven in Ten Doctors Have a Self-Tracking Patient
17th April 2013
Self-tracking is a budding area of research for pollsters — it was the headliner metric for the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s last health-focused report in January. Pew spoke to patients, not doctors, and found that 69 percent of people said they tracked at least one health metric, although half of those people were just tracking in their heads. More to the point, Pew’s research found that about a third of trackers share their data with someone else, and of those who share, about half share with a clinician. So if all the numbers are accurate, about one sixth of Americans are sharing health data with clinicians, but seven out of ten physicians have at least one patient in that group.
Including me — I track my weight and blood pressure daily, and give the printout to my primary care physician every six months when I go in for my checkup.