Dr. Chris Curry is a doctor with an MD and a PhD. She sees patients and teaches residents. And she teaches machines.
For seven years, Chris worked inside Apple Health, training devices to read the signals that matter most in women's bodies. Now, as Clinical Director for Women's Health at Oura, she believes those same signals can help women take better care of themselves — and help their doctors take better care of them too
Today, wearables adorn the wrists and fingers of half the U.S. adult population. A physician might collect four vital signs and a weight during an office visit. An Apple Watch or Oura ring collects something closer to 20,000 data points in a single day, without ever taking a break.
More does not automatically mean better. But there is still a divide opening up between what patients can measure about themselves and what medicine does with any of it. The usual explanation, Chris tells me, is that doctors can’t keep up with the flood.
Picture a 32-year-old on the edge of the exam table: eight months trying to conceive, watching friends announce their own pregnancies, she's worried. She has asked ChatGPT what her lab results mean, joined two online communities, and opens her wearable app every morning — it has six months of cycle length, basal temperature, and sleep, laid out in a graph she's studied more closely than anyone else ever will. So she turns her phone toward her doctor.
Her OB-GYN, of course, has just fifteen minutes. And a waiting room already behind schedule. The graphs in the app speak in a different vocabulary from her training, with a readiness score where she wants a differential, a trend where she wants a value with a reference range beside it. It was designed for a one-way, asynchronous conversation, not a compressed clinical encounter.
So she does the only defensible thing available to her: hands the phone back, and reaches for the history she knows how to take. Since her patient is young and healthy, she follows clinical guidelines and tells her patient to keep trying for a few more months.
But, Chris asks, what if there was a way to translate the output of all this wearable data into the right vocabulary? The Oura ring knows after all if a person is ovulating, experiencing significant stress, getting poor sleep. These could suggest different clinical guidance or treatment that could help people get pregnant much faster. And that difference, for many people, can be life-altering.
Maven (which has doctors) and Oura (which has data) are now partnering to bring actionable insights into the exam room, with use cases across reproductive health, from people trying to conceive to people in perimenopause.
Yesterday, we launched an IRB-approved research study to understand how continuous wearable biometrics show up in the experience of trying to conceive. Together, we hope to build the evidence base for the next generation of fertility tools. You can read more about our partnership here and research here.
Most importantly, you can listen to our interview with Dr. Chris Curry here.
Amy Shoenthal’s experience is a case in point: she showed up to the nephrologist with a perfectly formatted report from Claude of her recent lab work, referrals, medical history, supplements, height, weight and routines. Her doctor, true to form, only glanced at it. With mentions to both Maven and OURA, she explains why in her new piece for Forbes.
We say that babies have a “due date” but in truth, predicting when a mom is going to go into labor is impossible—or so I thought. Now I think we may live in a world in which a smart watch or ring can predict labor onset in a similar way it can predict ovulation. Some day soon, this capability could transform the care of rural families who may have a long drive to the hospital.
It’s a duel: there were two competing op-eds in STAT last week about what the impact will be of “unbundling” obstetrics payments in 2027. One from Jeff Levin-Scherz, MD MBA FACP argues it will lead to more spending and worse care. One from ACOG argues the opposite. Both are well worth reading, and reveal how complex it is to create progress in health care.
Kristen V. Brown of Bloomberg did it again: she wrote the take we’ve all been waiting for on the many, many menopause products suddenly on the market and whether they’re actually doing anything. And, like a true reporter, she even tried all the gadgets and gizmos. (TLDR: the lion’s share of these products deserve your skepticism).
The city of Dallas, Texas has had the highest drop in child poverty in the last decade. And the solution required addressing the needs of moms, explained by this very watchable and inspiring video. In a very full circle moment, the program used was developed by my team at Ariadne Labs over a decade ago.
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