The U.S. healthcare system is in crisis. Financial instability is straining hospitals, frontline staff are stretched beyond capacity, and patients continue to encounter disjointed care and unequal access. Decades of focusing on reactive treatment over prevention have left us ill-equipped to manage chronic conditions, rising costs, and growing health disparities.
Despite widespread consensus about the importance of population health management and value-based care, the current approach isn’t moving the needle quickly enough. If we want to reduce costs and improve outcomes, we must reinvent how care is delivered by reaching more patients earlier to proactively manage risk, and keep people healthy.
Digital health provides us with that opportunity. Remote patient monitoring has proven its value, keeping vulnerable patients healthier and out of the hospital. At my former company, Vivify Health, we saw healthcare costs drop by more than 50% for patients using our RPM platform. Unfortunately, traditional RPM is expensive, logistically complex, and has limited patient reach, typically limited to the top 1% of risk. Practitioners report challenges with increased workload, patient anxiety, privacy concerns, and other issues when working with RPM.
What if we could unlock the power of remote care without costly equipment and technical headaches? And what if we could do that at a scale that truly moves the needle on population health?
The Impact of AI
The key to this change is already in the hands of over 90% of Americans: the smartphone. Embedded with advanced sensors, smartphones can open a proactive, personalized, and scalable new frontier in healthcare when supercharged with AI. The technology in smartphones is amazing, including 5G networks, accelerometers to detect three-dimensional orientation and movement, gyroscopes to provide precise motion and orientation, high-resolution cameras, audio sensors, and now even neural processing units.
Combine these tools with advanced AI models, including natural language processing, advanced language models, and generative and agentic AI, and smartphones become the kind of tools once envisioned for the era of space travel.
We can use smartphones to gather a rich stream of health signals in real time to build a robust, longitudinal record. Smartphone sensors can track many vitals as accurately as medical devices. AI models are being trained to recognize oral drugs based on submitted photos, representing a breakthrough in medication adherence tracking and potentially eliminating the need for manual logging. This technology gives providers and family members real-time visibility into whether patients are actually taking their medications and taking them appropriately.
AI-powered analysis of vocal recordings provides insights into cognitive health. These analyses have been clinically proven to detect signs of depression, dementia, or cognitive decline. AI can even track Parkinson’s disease development and progression.
Additionally, smartphones can analyze a user’s gait and expose social determinants of health factors, like lack of transportation, to providers and payers.
Proactive Intervention
Smartphone health monitoring removes the limitations of RPM. The combination of smartphones with the fast-growing capabilities of AI delivers the benefits of RPM without the cost and complexity, extending care to patients who were previously unreachable. It equips providers with predictive insights that lead to earlier intervention. It engages patients directly on the devices they already own and use daily. And it enables population health monitoring and management at scale.
AI models can detect patterns from millions of data points almost instantly, sifting through health signals to surface important clinical insights and identify hidden risk. The models can then leverage the library of accumulated medical knowledge to suggest next best actions for physicians and nurses.
These tools can enable ongoing, proactive data collection to help identify subtle physiological changes indicating serious health issues like early diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, or heart disease.
Importantly, recommendations, insights and assistance can be tailored to the needs of individual patients, strengthening patient engagement and improving health outcomes.
Patients and Providers Are Ready
Patients are signaling growing support for the use of AI in their own care. A recent survey of consumers found that 57% support the use of AI in their healthcare, especially if it means they can have more one-on-one time with their physicians. Meanwhile, 66% of clinicians report they now use AI in their practice for tasks ranging from documentation to assisting with diagnosis, nearly doubling the rate year over year. This suggests that patients and their families may be more likely to use healthcare tools based on AI if they understand the benefits.
Perhaps most importantly, this approach levels the playing field by expanding access to underserved communities. It turns passive data into powerful action, which powers smarter care, better research, and improved public health outcomes.
We don’t have to wait for the future of healthcare. It’s already here, in our pockets. The convergence of AI and smartphones is our opportunity to move beyond reactive care and finally unlock health at scale.
About Eric Rock
Eric Rock is the CEO and co-founder of Percipio Health, which offers patient health monitoring using smartphone apps, without additional devices. He has founded, scaled and exited three software companies, including Vivify Health, a remote patient monitoring platform that was acquired by UnitedHealthGroup’s Optum division in 2019.
