Q&A: ŌURA’s Dr. Chris Curry Discusses the Expanding Role of Wearables in Health

HEALTHTECH: How have wearables become more integrated in the care continuum? How has feedback from providers and patients helped with those changes?

CURRY: When wearables were initially launched, many of them did not have features that made sense in the health space. One of the reasons that wearables have become more integrated more recently is that they’re beginning to own their identity as supportive of healthcare delivery, instead of just being an accessory.

Next is a scalability. Healthcare is expensive, and when you look at the overall cost of healthcare versus the current cost of wearables, wearables feel like a strong investment when it comes to prevention and early screening. Wearables like ŌURA Ring are nonintrusive — they don’t beep, and they’re not alarming. This ease of use supports long-term adoption and engagement.

The value of wearables has also evolved beyond basic health and fitness tracking. Today’s devices can provide continuous, longitudinal insights across a broad spectrum of health metrics, offering a more comprehensive view of an individual’s well-being over time. That ability to deliver ongoing, meaningful health information is a major reason wearables have become increasingly preferred by consumers.

READ MORE: AI-powered healthcare wearables are the next generation of remote patient monitoring.

As a physician, I see people for eight minutes. If you were in my office and we were doing a cervical cancer screening, let’s say, we would talk to each other for five minutes. And patients are usually on good behavior, giving answers that are often not the full ones because there isn’t time, or there's a power dynamic, or there’s something that’s precluding the full story from coming through. I think the fact that wearables are part of a person’s daily life means that wearables tell a much more complete, nuanced story about people than the vital signs you get when a person sits down at the nurse’s station for the first two minutes of their visit. Wearables contextualize changes happening in real time or that may not be easily articulated by the patient, and account for physical, environmental and behavioral factors not easily measured in a standard appointment.

The feedback we get from members has been really important. The creation of wearables has not happened in isolation. ŌURA members are being very clear about what they want. They want ŌURA Ring to help them prevent disease, stay healthy, make good choices and integrate their data so that they’re not just looking at a graph of a heart rate and trying to figure out if things are going well. That feedback from members has been really useful. I think it’s given us permission to take different, validated sensors and metrics and do the thing that a physician is supposed to do, which is to provide the initial guidance that a member needs to make informed decisions.

Our work with physicians and our different partnerships help us realize that more data is not always better. There is a difference between a lot of information and valuable information. We have all of these different moments where we’re working with clinicians and getting to hear from them, “Oh, that was too much information. I want to give feedback on what was really valuable in this clinical moment.”

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HEALTHTECH: Wearables have been around for quite some time, but it feels like this recent era is signaling a significant change. What would you say is contributing to that?

CURRY: When wearables were basically a fitness tracker, it seemed wrong to believe that counting steps or tracking workouts was going to have a meaningful place in most physician-patient interactions. Over time, however, as the sensors have gotten better and as validation has refined their capabilities, it allows the numbers to be more trustworthy. For example, everyone knows what an electrocardiogram is. We use that as our benchmark for heart rate variability, so that when we say a number for someone’s heart rate, members know where it came from and can trust it.

So, while one part of it is that the tech has evolved, the other part is whether the validity and the trustworthiness have evolved. Part of it is also that the feature set is richer, so if there are things that are helping you think about metabolism and cardiovascular health and activity all on the same platform, suddenly the effort that it takes for the healthcare system to want that data pulled in feels much more worth it than with single-solution wearables. It doesn't make sense from a health system perspective to engage with one-off solutions; you want to think about experiences that are integrated, and I think that’s part of the change.

HEALTHTECH: What do you think is the next phase for remote patient monitoring?

CURRY: For physicians, the next phase is to think about disease prevention, i.e., I want my patients to be healthy as long as possible. It’s about early detection or screening. If you have an issue, I want to find it before it’s really damaging. And then, it’s about management. Let’s deal with it. Let’s find the best way forward for the healthiest number of years lived.

I think the next step in patient monitoring is tools that can do all three. We all have a hard time being our best selves every day, but imagine a tool that can help us with prevention — making different food choices, de-stressing, etc. — decision-making and management. That tool should help users and clinicians work together on a care continuum covering those three areas.