Being in a position where I work in both healthcare and marketing, I love seeing these two worlds come together. Last week I read the article, “Why Marketers Should Care About The Quantified Self,” which touches on a topic that is of personal and professional interest to me. As the article explains, the quantified self movement involves tracking personal health metrics through online calorie counting, activity monitoring devices such as the FitBit, logging of heart rate and other physical data, and more. Not only is this 
of interest to marketing folks, who can use the data to better position products and ads, it’s especially useful to healthcare providers.
Smartphones have become commonplace in many of our lives and have paved the way for mobile health. Consumers want to not only communicate with their care providers more quickly and easily, many want to share information about themselves that their doctor would not normally have access to. Quantitative self-reporters have a slew of data about themselves – how many hours they sleep each night, the number of miles they walked last week, blood pressure readings over the last month. With access to this data, doctors can be better informed of a patient’s history and current health standing. All of their health information can give providers a more complete view and can be a powerful tool to improve their care. This is in addition to the self-motivating factor involved in consumers seeing their data and improving upon their stats.
To read more on the quantified self movement, view our recent white paper, “Beyond Gamification: Revolutionizing Healthcare with the Quantified Self.”
