Fitbit surveillance | When wishes heal | Take our survey!

Insurance companies may be watching you through your step tracker -- and some medical devices

Katherine Du/NPR Help Guide Our Coverage  We want to hear from you! Would you be willing to take 10 or 15 minutes to complete a survey about NPR's online health coverage?  Your opinions will help us improve Shots and make it more useful for you. We're particularly interested in finding out what you like, what you'd like to see changed and how we fit in with your other sources of health news and information. So please take a few minutes to fill out our survey. We'd be grateful if you would!   Paul Marotta/Getty Images for Fitbit Should You Let Your Insurance Company Spy On You Through Your Fitbit? Last year Kathy Klute-Nelson got an offer she couldn't refuse from her employer: Wear a Fitbit, walk every day and get up to $300 off your yearly health insurance premiums. "I thought, 'Why don't I try this?'" Klute-Nelson says. "'Maybe it'll motivate me.'“ This year an estimated 6 million workers worldwide will receive wearable fitness trackers as part of workplace wellness programs, and many will get annual financial incentives that range from about $100 to more than $2,000. But is there a dark side to this trend? If the Affordable Care Act is ever repealed, insurers could deny coverage based on health status, says Andrew Boyd, an assistant professor of biometrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And beaming your health data to insurance companies can have more immediate downsides. As we report in a story from ProPublica, insurers are already using data collected from certain medical devices to limit coverage. They're capturing data from sleep apnea patients through their CPAP machines, and using that intel to decide whether to pay for the machine.  Read more about the ways insurers are tracking you through your fitbit ... or dive into this investigation of how they keep an eye on patients through medical devices.   Courtesy of Tiffany Rowe When Kids' Wishes Come True, Sometimes Their Health Gets A Boost Tiffany Rowe, a 46-year-old life coach in the San Francisco Bay area, still remembers how it felt as a teenager to be hoisted onstage to dance with Michael Jackson during his “Bad” concert tour. She was 15 and recovering from an excruciating round of treatment for severe idiopathic aplastic anemia — basically total bone marrow failure -- and dancing with Jackson had been her dream. "I was in front of all of those people, and I could hear the roar, and I was calm," she recalls. "I felt exactly the way I needed to feel, at home and confident in my body." The moment was transformative for Rowe, who says it aided her recovery. A new study suggests her experience may not be unique. Researchers looked back at the cases of nearly 1,000 children with serious illnesses. Half the children had received wishes from the Make-A-Wish foundation and the other half hadn't. The children granted wishes were substantially less likely to visit the emergency department or to have an unplanned hospital admission within two years. To learn why it helped, read on for the researchers’ analysis of the surprising effects of this intervention. We hope you enjoy these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism on Shots and follow us for daily stories at @NPRHealth. Your Shots editor, Carmel Wroth   You received this message because you're subscribed to our Health emails. |  Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy | NPR 1111 N. CAPITOL ST. NE WASHINGTON DC 20002