A Large-Scale Initiative Inviting Patients to Share Personal Fitness Tracker Data with Their Providers: Initial Results

BACKGROUND: Personal fitness trackers (PFT) have substantial potential to improve healthcare. OBJECTIVE: To quantify and characterize early adopters who shared their PFT data with providers. METHODS: We used bivariate statistics and logistic regression to compare patients who shared any PFT data vs. patients who did not. RESULTS: A patient portal was used to invite 79,953 registered portal users to share their data. Of 66,105 users included in our analysis, 499 (0.8%) uploaded data during an initial 37-day study period. Bivariate and regression analysis showed that early adopters were more likely than non-adopters to be younger, male, white, health system employees, and to have higher BMIs. Neither comorbidities nor utilization predicted adoption. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate that patients had little intrinsic desire to share PFT data with their providers, and suggest that patients most at risk for poor health outcomes are least likely to share PFT data. Marketing, incentives, and/or cultural change may be needed to induce such data-sharing.