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ChristianaCare leverages wearables so patients can be healthier and more productive

BY TIM SHIUH, M.D

A FEW MONTHS AGO, an 81-year-old man walked out of his home to retrieve his mail when he collapsed from a heart arrhythmia. He fell on his driveway unconscious.

No one was around to see what happened—but the immediate medical response was as if he had a clinical team on standby.

The smartwatch he was wearing detected he had fallen and was not moving. Within seconds, the watch pinged and vibrated but received no response. The watch then activated a 911 call and pinpointed to the man’s precise location by GPS. An ambulance was dispatched to his home, where paramedics found him still lying on the ground. Concurrently, his watch facilitated the notification of his daughter—his emergency contact—that he was being transported to the emergency department at Christiana Hospital.

The man was treated and discharged home with a pacemaker. Throughout the entire incident—from collapse to arrival in our emergency department—only 35 minutes elapsed.

As ChristianaCare’s chief health information officer and vice president for digital clinical transformation, I work at the intersection between data, technology, and patient care as we innovate and create new ways of providing care that leverage today’s—and tomorrow’s—technology. As a physician, I also continue to practice and see patients on a regular basis. It just so happens that I was in the emergency department that day, and I had the opportunity to care for this man and learn about his extraordinary case.

Wearables are more and more a part of our everyday life. Smartwatches and fitness trackers are becoming increasingly popular and more powerful. For example, today’s Apple Watch can track the wearer’s blood oxygen levels, as well as data about heart rate and the heart’s electrical activity (ECG). It also can detect falls, as happened for our patient. At ChristianaCare, we’ve been at the leading edge of integrating the power of wearables into the health care experience.

For example, ChristianaCare patients who own iOS 15 iPhones were among the first in the nation to have the option to share important everyday health information stored in the Apple Health app directly with our doctors.

Dr. Tim Shiuh, chief health information officer and VP of clinical transformation at Newark-headquartered ChristianaCare, sees it as a step toward whole health and wellness care that keeps track of health and fitness every day, as opposed to the kind of healthcare that centers on practitioners diagnosing you when you’re sick.


Dr. Tim Shiuh. (Photo via LinkedIn)

“We really want to pivot to being continuously involved in your care and engaging and building the relationship” between providers and patients, Shiuh told Technical.ly. “This technology is really going to change the paradigm. I think really it changes patients and how they think about how they manage disease and wellness. It’s an exciting time, when people are engaged with their smartphones and embracing the technology from a fitness and wellness perspective.”