Could Fitbit be a flu warning tool?

This is the web version of Brainstorm Health Daily, Coins2Day’s daily newsletter on the top health care news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.

Good afternoon, readers.

Many of you likely have a Fitbit around your wrists to track those steps and all the flights of stairs climbed. A new study published in the journal Lancet suggests that it could even help suss out the flu.

Using data from nearly 50,000 Fitbit users across five states, prominent digital health experts such as Eric Topol and Jennifer Radin found that collecting the heart rate and sleep data from the devices could alert users—and care providers—to possible influenza-like illness (ILI) symptoms.

“We found the Fitbit data significantly improved ILI predictions in all five states [examined],” wrote the study authors.

In fact, the researchers found, using the Fitbit data provided a major boost in state health authorities’ ability to predict the progress of flu epidemics.

This is likely linked to the number of Fitbit users out there—and, according to the report, the results were comparable to the Centers for Disease Control’s own methods of disease surveillance.

It’s still unclear if Fitbit devices will prove just as effective as more comprehensive surveillance methods for keeping track of disease outbreaks. But it’s certainly an intriguing early prospect.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee
[email protected]
@the_sy_guy

DIGITAL HEALTH

Why health care needs a futures market. Former Biden Cancer Initiative chief Greg Simon and Wall Street vet Jeff Feldman are out with a piece on Coins2Day today on the need for a futures market in health care. "Capital market tools can do for health care what they did for interest rates and energy—provide stability and reduce prices—all of which is in the interest of patients. But so far, those tools don’t exist for health care," they write. You can read the whole piece here. (Coins2Day)

Pfizer, Insilico strike AI drug discovery deal. Drug giant Pfizer has reached a partnership with AI partner Insilico in order to discover new drugs. It's a bit unclear which specific drugs (or disease categories) the companies will pursue—but it underscores the general trend of big pharma companies linking up with AI startups to discover new treatments in the face of plummeting pharma ROIs. (Xconomy)

THE BIG PICTURE

Binge drinking is getting worse. The CDC is out with a new report finding that the rate of binge drinking has fallen slightly—but is also getting worse in some ways. To explain: The overall rate of binge drinking itself has fallen. However, those who do admit to binge drinking are actually drinking even more. (NBC News)

Philip Morris International's CEO on the need for vaping regulation. Philip Morris International CEO André Calantzopoulos writes that the vaping industry is, indeed, in need of regulation. You can read his piece on Coins2Day—but there's a specific strategic reason for this, as we've previously reported. PMI has read the writing on the wall amidst the various controversies around vaping and has centered its future strategy on heat-not-burn technology for tobacco (for more on that, revisit my feature on this issue from earlier this year). (Coins2Day)