Our newest feature – the Apple Health app integration – is here, allowing your practice to work smoothly with the tech your clients love! With just a few taps, clients can effortlessly sync their health data from their Apple Health app to their Lifestyle Journal, giving you instant access to a wealth of data. Plus, this integration isn’t limited to just the Apple Watch – clients can also sync their data from other wearables such as their Oura Ring or Garmin watch, as long as they’re linked to the Apple Health app. This integration not only makes tracking progress a breeze, but it also sets you up to provide enhanced personalized care to your clients. From health data tracking, such as body fat percentage, to sleep tracking and fitness tracking, insights into these metrics will allow you to make concise recommendations to empower clients to achieve their goals.
Read on to learn about the benefits of tracking this valuable client data and how to leverage this new integration in Practice Better to provide a superior client experience.
It’s no secret that tracking wearables in health and wellness has enhanced client care. Let’s dive into a few benefits of leveraging the Apple Health integration into your practice.
Keeping track of your clients’ health data is one of the most accurate and objective ways to monitor their health status and measure their progress. By analyzing vital signs such as heart rate, as well as activity level, and sleep patterns, you gain a comprehensive view of your clients’ health and well-being. Plus, having access to this data during their next session can help you have more informed discussions about their progress and recommend any changes along the way. Integrating clients’ wearable health tracker allows you to assess whether they’re on track to reaching their goals or if adjustments need to be made to their treatment plan.
As a practitioner, you know that client care is never one-size-fits-all. Each client has unique needs, habits, and routines to consider when developing an effective treatment plan. By tracking your clients’ health data, you gain valuable insights into their daily lives, allowing you to personalize their protocols and provide more effective care. By collecting large amounts of data consistently over time, wearable technology such as the Apple Watch give you a much more accurate image of your client’s health status. Not only can your recommendations be more precise, but this technology can help you and your clients determine what success looks like.
If you’ve encouraged your client to aim for 10,000 steps a day, what better way to hold them accountable than to have them use their wearable to track their progress? Their wearable will serve as a reminder that their progress is bringing them closer to achieving their goals, and you’ll have the data to cheer them on as they move forward in your client care. The ability to see their results in real time helps to increase their motivation to chase their health goals.
In today's world, where remote care is becoming increasingly common, access to accurate health data is essential. Wearables can enable remote monitoring of clients so that you can check on their health status and intervene as necessary from a distance. By adopting this innovative approach, you can differentiate yourself from your competitors and deliver personalized care that meets your clients' needs.
The Apple Watch is the most popular smartwatch on the market, outselling its rival by 2.5x. Smartwatches continue to become more popular post-pandemic, so you may see more clients using smartwatches to track their health data, and a savvy health and wellness practitioner, like you, can use this trend to your advantage.
For practitioners, adding this integration to your Practice Better account allows you to meet clients where they are–if they are using technology to track their metrics and improve their health, it makes perfect sense to incorporate this tech into your care plan.
Using health data from wearables also helps practitioners automatically keep objective measures of progress. Incorporating health metrics from wearables like the Apple Smartwatch, Oura Ring, or Garmin Watch can reduce reliance on subjective measures, like your clients’ memories, to track progress on follow-up.
Clients also benefit from this integration simply by avoiding manual data entry, which removes sludge, or unnecessary friction, that might otherwise cause a client to stop following your treatment plan or protocol. Your clients are already making potentially big lifestyle changes, so making their tracking easy and convenient pays off for everyone.
In order to reap the benefits of this integration, have your clients go to the Settings section on the home screen, select 3rd Party Integrations, and choose Apple Health. Your client will then toggle the metrics they’d like to make available. Not everyone will want to submit menstrual cycle tracking data, for example, but for those who do women’s health or hormone-related work, this is an important metric to encourage your clients to sync.
All of this valuable information from Apple Health can enhance treatment plans:
Your clients can customize what data they want to share with you, so it helps to be specific when asking them to sync their smartwatch.
For clients, visualizing progress towards their health goals is easy! Comparing current activity to target activity can help them see whether they’re on track.
In the Client Portal, they can navigate to the Journal, and see the Apple Health metrics they’ve selected to track.
Viewing real-time, daily data can help someone stay motivated in the moment–have you ever counted your steps and found yourself taking the longer walk home to meet your 10,000-step goal? That’s the type of feedback that can move clients from complacent to compelled.
Additionally, viewing longer-term data, over weeks or months, can help someone visualize how far they’ve come in their health journey, especially when they might be fatiguing in pursuit of their goals and need a reminder to stick to your plan.
The Journal Analysis feature allows you to view, compare, and analyze data, including Apple Health data, in your journals. What’s more, your clients have access to these analytics as well, so they can see and compare their progress the same way you can.
Click the Analysis tab at the top of your Daily Journal Summary page. On the Journal Analysis page, you’ll be able to select the Apple Health metrics to analyze. You can select one metric (e.g. Apple Health – Activity) and then select the duration of time you’d like to analyze to look at your activity trends, determine if you’ve reached your targets, and see which days there was no activity logged.
In addition, you can compare different metrics over time. For example, you may want to compare your activity levels and sleep duration over time to determine whether the additional activity you’re doing is contributing to higher quality and longer sleep times.
By default, Practice Better will ignore days with missing data when plotting points on the report charts. You can connect points between missing days by clicking the More Options Menu (3 dots) to the right of the chart and select “connect missing data points” from the menu provided.
In addition, you can compare different metrics over time. For example, you may want to compare your activity levels and sleep duration over time to determine whether the additional activity you’re doing is contributing to higher quality and longer sleep times.
Since all this amazing data is now at your and your clients’ fingertips, you can use it to inform your protocols, next steps, follow-up discussions, and check-ins–providing even better client care than ever before.
Having access to this type of information allows you to:
The Apple Health integration makes it easy for you to provide more data-driven insights to your tech-loving clients, helping them use their tools to get the most out of their time with you.
Instead of relying on your client’s recall of their daily activities, leveraging wearable technology to provide objective, numerical data is a helpful aid in your practice. Your clients will appreciate that they don’t have to manually enter data into their journals, and they’ll get a boost from seeing their progress as they continue to work with you. For your clients who love their tech, the Apple Health integration can help you meet them where they are, enhancing their experience with a tremendous amount of health data collected right from their wrist.
Practice Better is the complete practice management platform for nutritionists, dietitians, and wellness professionals. Streamline your practice and begin your free trial today.
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