Seventy-one percent of Americans now use health-related apps. Sixty-four percent use connected health devices. That’s not a trend on the horizon. That’s your members, right now, walking around with more personal health data in their pockets than most clinical encounters ever captured.
So why aren’t we talking about what to do with it?
The data is already there
The conversation in health plans and self-funded benefits circles tends to fixate on data access: how to get it, how to aggregate it, how to use it to drive smarter decisions at the population level. That instinct isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s aimed at the wrong target.
The shift happening in wearables tells a more interesting story. Consumers are moving away from fitness trackers(step counters, calorie monitors) toward holistic health devices. Devices that track sleep quality, stress response, heart rate variability, blood oxygen. Usage of holistic wearables climbed from 20% to 24% between 2024 and 2026, while fitness-oriented wearable use dropped. People aren’t just logging workouts anymore. They’re trying to understand their bodies. They want to connect the dots between how they live and how they feel.
That appetite is real. And most health plans are doing almost nothing to meet it.
The trust problem is telling you something
Here’s the data point that should give every health plan executive pause: AI trust in healthcare dropped from 52% to 44% in just two years, even as device and app adoption climbed. Those two trends are not a contradiction; they’re a message.
Members are willing to use technology for their own health management. They are not willing to hand that data over and trust that someone else will use it well. The more health organizations have leaned into data-as-asset framing, the more members have pulled back from trusting AI-driven healthcare decisions. That’s not a coincidence.
The extraction model, in which the plan or employer is the primary beneficiary of members’ health data, has a trust ceiling. Members can sense when the value exchange is off. And when they sense it, they disengage. No wellness incentive program or engagement campaign fixes that underlying problem.
Empowerment is the actual strategy
The question worth asking isn’t “how do we get access to member wearable data?” It’s “how do we help members get more value from what they’re already collecting?”
Those are fundamentally different orientations. One treats the member as a data source, the other treats the member as the decision-maker.
What does empowerment actually look like in practice? It starts with health literacy at the data level. Most people tracking their resting heart rate or sleep stages have no framework for what those numbers mean in the context of their overall health. They can see the trend. They can’t interpret it. A health plan that builds tools, communications, or care navigation around helping members understand and act on their own data is doing something genuinely useful, and rare.
It means meeting members where their attention already is. They’re not waiting for a quarterly benefits statement. They’re checking their wearable data daily, sometimes multiple times a day. The engagement touchpoint isn’t the portal. It’s the moment a member looks at their sleep score and wonders whether it’s connected to the fatigue they mentioned to their PCP last month.
It means designing for member outcomes first, not engagement metrics, not cost containment, not risk stratification. When members get healthier, everything else follows. But you don’t get there by treating their personal health data as a business intelligence asset. You get there by giving them the tools, the context, and the support to do something with what they already know about themselves.
The health plans that earn trust will win
The organizations that define digital health strategy around empowerment rather than extraction are building something that compounds over time: member trust. And trust, in healthcare, is both rare and durable. Members who feel like their health plan is genuinely working in their interest don’t just stay; they engage, they act on recommendations, and they produce the outcomes that actually move the numbers everyone cares about.
The wearable wave is already here. Your members are already part of it. The only question is whether your organization shows up as a partner in their health, or just another entity that wants something from them.
