What if the most important moment in healthcare happens before a diagnosis is ever made? Healthcare systems continue to spend billions treating diseases that could often be prevented or identified earlier. As digital health and wearable technology mature, organisations have a growing opportunity to shift from managing illness to influencing health before disease develops. This raises a simple but important question: What if we’re using these tools too late? Come alongside the HRW Digital and Shift teams as we dive in! What’s Better Than Medication? No Diagnosis! We understand the value of being proactive in our daily lives; whether it’s preparing for a deadline at work or an upcoming holiday. However, for many of us, the healthcare experience is reactive rather than proactive: First we notice something is off, then we receive a diagnosis and medication to address the issue. This pattern is most evident in conditions that build quietly over time, such as cardiovascular health, obesity, declining mobility, and diabetes. For example, cardiovascular disease is largely driven by modifiable lifestyle factors yet continues to account for one in three deaths globally. Beyond the human impact, the economic cost is massive, with cardiovascular disease costing hundreds of billions annually and obesity costing the UK up to £74 billion per year! The challenge we’re facing here isn’t awareness; it’s turning prevention into something that feels immediate, actionable, and sustainable. So, where do we go from here? Case Study: How My Health Became Visible About a year ago, I spontaneously purchased an apple watch simply to track my health without constantly needing to grab my phone. Shortly after, I came across the StepUp app, which allowed me to share step tracking with friends and family. What started as passive tracking quickly turned into more proactive decisions. Since using these tools, my daily movement has increased significantly: -Average distance:1 to 5.7 miles per day (+84%) -Active calories burned: 319 to 762 per day (+139%) -Exercise minutes: 36 to 80 per day (+122%). -Daily steps: 7,152 to 12,695 (+78%), largely driven by the motivation to maintain streaks and keep up with others. Perhaps the most interesting part is that this transformation wasn’t prompted by a diagnosis or health scare. It was simply driven by greater visibility into my own health combined with ongoing accountability. A 2022 study done by BMJ followed nearly 17,000 moderately healthy adults, ranging from 18-65 years old. This study showed using physical activity monitors led to an extra 1,235 steps per day and an additional 49 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week1 Over time, these small daily decisions have improved my cardiovascular fitness and stamina while reinforcing healthier habits. Even more encouraging, the effect has extended beyond me, with more than 30 friends and family members joining StepUp and becoming more active themselves. It’s a simple but powerful example of how wearable technology can help shift us from reacting to our health to proactively maintaining it every day. The Change: Continuous Health Through Wearable Technology Digital health and wearable technology, such as Apple Watches and smart rings, present a valuable opportunity to observe health continually rather than in isolated moments. Smart watches have already become part of everyday life, with around 44% of Americans now using a device to track their health. Since their rise in popularity, studies have shown that simply wearing a tracker can lead to small shifts that build up over time. In fact, wearable activity trackers have been shown to increase physical activity by approximately 1,800 additional steps per day on average, according to a 2022 systematic review of 39 reviews and meta-analyses covering more than 160,000 participants2 Beyond behaviour change, wearables are also revealing what traditional care often misses. Research shows they can detect conditions like atrial fibrillation up to 4× more frequently than standard care (i.e., primary care visits), with 57% of identified cases showing no symptoms, meaning they likely would have gone undiagnosed without continuous monitoring. Similarly, wearing a tracker has been shown to motivate users to become more active in their daily lives. This is important because reaching 9,000-10,000 daily steps has been linked to a ~21% reduction in cardiovascular rate and nearly a 40% reduction in mortality3 Taken together, this signals a fundamental change: from diagnosing disease once it’s visible, to identifying risk while it’s still forming. Continuous, always-on data doesn’t just help us track health; it gives us a real opportunity to prevent issues and take hold of our health in advance. The Bigger Picture: Prevention as a System Reset The real opportunity here is not just in how we track health, but how we act on it. Prevention is fundamentally about identifying meaningful changes early enough to act. By helping people understand their personal health baseline and track it over time, wearables can make those changes more visible and support ongoing healthy behaviours. For healthcare organisations, this creates a clear opportunity: moving beyond using digital health and wearable technology to manage disease and instead designing them to drive behaviors that reduce risk before disease develops. In this sense, digital health is about leveraging continuous health insights to help people better understand their habits, recognise patterns, and make healthier choices over time. By supporting greater awareness, accountability, and behaviour change, wearables can become a valuable tool in building the everyday habits that contribute to long-term health. If you’re interested in exploring the intersection of habits, health, and wearable technology, check out some of our SHIFT team’s work in this area. At HRW, our Digital Health and Shift teams help healthcare, pharma and medtech organisations understand how people engage with digital tools, identify barriers to behaviour change and design interventions that drive measurable outcomes. If you’re exploring digital health, patient engagement, prevention strategies or behaviour change programmes, fill in the Contact form below. References Do fitness trackers really help people move more? – Harvard Health) The Lancet Digital Health Kernsh News Apply Now!