High-res
Distinguishing the Hype from Reality in Mobile Health
“Dear New York Times, please don’t serve us infomercial articles”
When you read the above tweet stream, you would think that HealthTap, a social network of doctors to whom patients can pose questions, is the next blockbuster drug of the century. The tweets link to this article in the esteemed New York Times:
Here is how the article starts:
While most start-ups feverishly track figures like the total number of users, Ron Gutman, the founder and chief executive of the health information start-up, HealthTap, is more interested in a different data point. This week, the start-up heard from its 10,000th user who said the site saved her life.
Which coincidentally reads just like the advertising that company is sending to my inbox:
And look, in the last few days since the the article was published, they’ve saved another 182 lives and prominently display this on their website!
I am a physician researcher with specific training in biostatistics and epidemiology who studies health outcomes. I am also a technology enthusiast and I co-direct a mobile technology program for managing chronic diseases. I believe that mobile technology has great promise for making a difference in the lives of individuals with chronic disease, but we have to use real evidence to understand the impact.
I don’t see anywhere how HealthTap recorded or evaluated or defined how a “life was saved”. So much important health research is performed and never even gets the light of day in such an esteemed publication, yet we take some tech founder’s claims about health as a given? Let’s not forget that he obviously has an economic interest in touting his app’s effectiveness, and from what I can tell he doesn’t have any experience in assessing health outcomes.
Dear New York Times, I am an avid subscriber and reader of your esteemed publication. But please, do some fact checking. I would think that stories related to health (even if they are in the technology section) would be more carefully vetted for their accuracy. It is folly to give some founder’s claims about health outcomes equivalence to scientists and researchers who spend years and lots of resources and effort trying to assess whether a technology does really save lives. You should be providing objective reporting on new health technology service, not some sycophantic tech blog piece that is afraid to offend a popular Silicon Valley startup. I also posted a brief comment here and there are other comments which reveal a very different narrative of the company here, not to mention the fact that they tend to dabble in hyperbole as a practice.