The real advantages will come as these innovations start to cross boundaries between groups of professionals. When you can share the information from your wearable device with your doctor, who can upload that into an electronic record that works with the systems your specialists are using, and they can compare that data against the things your genome suggests you might be at elevated risk for and consider the interventions that are most likely to work for you as an individual — then we’ll really be onto something.
On the patient side, there is a generational divide between people who are used to sharing lots of personal information and people who have been trained to keep everything to themselves. On the provider side, there is an ingrained way of thinking about how to make good decisions (with an over-reliance on “gut instinct” and subjective experience). On the research side, the practice of publishing only successful studies — some with dubious definitions of success — means that failed research is never shared, and we lose a lot of available context for the studies that are published, misleading us all about the significance of various findings. In the entire system, incentives are misaligned so that the care and health of the patient isn’t actually the primary concern.