Your Patients Now Have Two Front Doors

On October 12, Google announced that Function Health members will be able to bring their lab results into the Google Health app later this fall. That is more than 160 tests, sitting next to the sleep, heart rate variability, and activity data from a Fitbit or Pixel Watch, and interpreted by Google’s Health Coach. The same day, Google announced a strategic investment in Flo Health to bring women’s health data into the same app. In August, it was Abbott’s Lingo glucose sensor.

A month earlier, Apple announced that users of its Health app will soon be able to order a lab panel from Quest Diagnostics directly from their iPhone. For $119, a patient gets more than 50 biomarkers covering cardiometabolic health and organ function. The order is approved by a third-party clinician network. The blood is drawn at one of Quest’s roughly 2,000 patient service centers. The results come back to the Health app, right next to the patient’s steps, sleep, and heart rate.

Notice who is missing from both sequences: the patient’s own physician. Unless the patient chooses to share the results, their care team may never see them.

This isn’t a criticism of Apple, Google, or their partners. Convenient, affordable lab testing is good for patients. But it is a clear signal of where healthcare is going, and health system leaders should take it seriously.

Much of the commentary this week says Google just “entered diagnostics.” It didn’t. Function and Quest still run the labs. What Apple and Google are building is more valuable than a lab: the place where patients go to understand their own health.

The patient is now a consumer, with a platform

The shift has been building for years. Now it’s arriving all at once.

• Rock Health’s 2025 Consumer Adoption Survey found that 57% of U.S. adults own at least one wearable or connected health device. Wearable ownership alone reached 46%, up from 13% in 2015.

• Patients wear an Apple Watch, a Pixel Watch, an Oura ring, or the new Fitbit Air. Most owners wear theirs five or more days a week.

• Apple Health and Google Health now combine that wellness data with clinical records pulled from providers and patient portals. The two platforms also sync with each other.

• Patients increasingly ask their favorite AI assistant about their symptoms, their lab values, and their medications before they ask their doctor. OpenAI says more than 300 million people a week ask ChatGPT health questions, and ChatGPT Health now connects to Apple Health and to medical records from Epic and other EHRs.

The result: the most complete, most current picture of a patient’s health increasingly lives on their phone, under a consumer brand. Not in the EHR, and not with the provider who has known them for twenty years.

Proximity doesn’t travel

Health systems were built on proximity. The hospital down the road, the physician who delivered your children, the clinic where the staff know your name. That physical closeness produced something valuable: trust. And trust is what keeps patients in a network.

In the physical world, proximity still matters. In the digital world, it doesn’t exist. Every health system, every telehealth startup, and every tech platform is exactly one tap away from your patient. Distance is zero for everyone.

Many organizations think their patient app solves this. It doesn’t. A patient portal is necessary, but it doesn’t set you apart. Your competitor down the street often runs the same app, sometimes from the same vendor. Patients open it to pay a bill or check a result, then close it. It’s a transaction, not a relationship.

So the strategic question is this: how do you carry the trust you built in the physical world into the digital one, onto the patient’s phone and into the AI tools they use, before someone else occupies that space?

The gap the consumer platforms leave open

Here is what the consumer wave does not show you. The same Rock Health research describes wearable owners as generally younger, wealthier, healthier, more urban, and more likely to have commercial insurance.

That is not the population driving the cost of care. The 78-year-old with heart failure, the Medicaid patient with uncontrolled hypertension, the rural diabetic without reliable broadband: these patients are much less likely to own an Oura ring. They are also the patients where a daily connection with their care team makes the biggest difference.

The data is different, too. A wrist-based estimate is not a clinically validated blood pressure reading. And wellness data sitting in a consumer app, no matter how rich, doesn’t trigger an alert or reach a nurse. By itself, it doesn’t change a care plan.

And more testing means more borderline results. An LDL slightly out of range. A fasting insulin that keeps creeping up. An AI coach can explain the number. It can’t adjust a medication, or notice that the patient’s blood pressure has been climbing for a week and pick up the phone. Whoever owns that “now what?” step owns the relationship.

RPM as the patient liaison in the digital world

This is where remote patient monitoring earns a different place in the strategy.

Too often, RPM is evaluated only as a clinical program with a reimbursement model: better outcomes for chronic conditions, funded by Medicare and Medicaid fee-for-service codes. That case holds. CMS’s 2026 changes lowered the data and time thresholds for billing, which makes more patients eligible and the programs more sustainable.

But the bigger opportunity is strategic. RPM is the only digital health tool that puts a physical object from the provider into the patient’s home. A blood pressure cuff on the kitchen counter. A scale by the bed. Used every day, as part of the patient’s routine, with a care team on the other end who notices when something changes and calls.

There is also an asymmetry worth noticing. The consumer platforms need patients to pay out of pocket: $119 for a Quest panel through Apple, $365 a year for a Function membership. Providers get paid to be in the home. Medicare reimburses RPM, and a growing number of Medicaid and commercial plans do too. Value-based care contracts add a second funding stream: for several chronic conditions, RPM has shown it can keep patients under control and help avoid costly ED visits and admissions, and that is exactly the savings an ACO or a risk-bearing contract is designed to capture. Fee-for-service or value-based, health systems already have a funded path into their patients’ homes. Yet most still treat it as a side program, not as a strategy to build digital trust with their patients.

That is proximity rebuilt for the digital age. It isn’t an app the patient forgets about. It’s a daily, physical, clinical connection between the patient and their provider. No consumer platform can reproduce it, because the platforms don’t have the clinical relationship. They have the data. Providers have the trust.

What it takes to do this at scale

To play this strategic role, RPM has to move beyond pilots and specialty programs to entire patient populations. From what we’ve seen deploying at scale, three things matter:

• Devices that work for everyone. Cellular devices that connect out of the box: no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth pairing, no smartphone required. This is what makes RPM work for the older, sicker, and rural patients the consumer market misses.

• Logistics built for populations, not pilots. Getting devices into tens of thousands of homes quickly and affordably, then managing returns and replacements, is an operational discipline. It can’t be a side project for a care management team.

• A bridge to the consumer platforms. Patients who already live in Apple Health or Google Health shouldn’t have to pick between their consumer tools and their care team. Their data should flow into the clinical workflow, inside the EHR where clinicians already work, instead of sitting in a separate silo.

At CareSimple, this is the platform we’ve built: cellular medical devices in patients’ homes, shipping through Amazon’s fulfillment network so programs can scale to whole populations, and deep integration with Epic. Today we also sync Google Health data from both iOS and Android smartphones for the health systems, providers, and payers we serve. The goal is simple: wherever the patient’s health data lives, their care team can see it and act on it.

A decision CMS is about to make

All of this is happening while CMS finalizes the 2027 Physician Fee Schedule, with the final rule expected in the coming weeks. In July, CMS proposed to lower the value of remote monitoring services, reasoning that devices may cost less than it first estimated, and to pay for RPM only when the monitoring is performed by clinical staff employed by the practice. It also asked for comment on bundling the current codes into four new G-codes.

CMS has legitimate concerns. The OIG has flagged problems in how some RPM programs are run, and fraud deserves real controls. But the proposal treats RPM as a billing problem to contain, at the very moment the patient relationship is moving into the home and onto the phone.

That shift will happen either way. If the final rule makes it harder for providers to put a clinical device in the home and staff a care team behind it, the relationship won’t disappear. It will move to the consumer platforms, which serve the healthiest and wealthiest patients and answer to no care plan.

So the question for CMS is bigger than what an RPM code should pay. It’s whether Medicare beneficiaries, the older, sicker, and rural patients the consumer market misses, will have a daily clinical connection with their own care team, or only an AI-empowered app.

The question for health system leaders

Consumer platforms will keep getting better and adding more. Labs, glucose, and women’s health this year; perhaps prescriptions or AI-guided care next. That’s fine. Patients will benefit from much of it.

But every health system, provider group, and payer should be asking one question: who owns the daily relationship with our patients?

If the answer is Apple, Google, or the competing system across town, then the trust built over decades in the physical world will slowly wear away in the digital one. RPM, deployed as a strategy rather than a service line, is one of the most practical ways to make sure the answer is you.

Start with a name. “RPM” is a billing code. Your patients need Direct Care: a direct line from their kitchen counter to your care team. Nobody wants to be monitored, and patients don’t sign up for a CPT code; they sign up for their doctor. So brand the program like the strategic asset it is, with a name patients remember, attached to the name they already trust: “[Your Health System] Direct Care.” Keep the CPT codes on the claim. Put your name on the relationship.

Sources

1. Quest Diagnostics, “Apple Health app Users to be Able to Order Labs from Quest Diagnostics,” Sept. 9, 2026
2. Rock Health, “What’s your score? Insights on wearables and connected devices from Rock Health’s 2025 Consumer Adoption Survey”
3. Google, “Google Health app lets you connect devices, health data”
4. 9to5Mac, “Google Health adds two-way Apple Health syncing on iPhone,” Aug. 3, 2026
5. Google, “Introducing the new Google Fitbit Air”
6. Function, “Function and Google join forces to connect daily habits with what’s happening inside the body,” PR Newswire, Oct. 12, 2026
7. MobiHealthNews, “Google expands health tracking partners with Flo Health,” Oct. 12, 2026
8. HLTH, “Abbott and Google partner to integrate glucose data with AI health coaching,” Aug. 14, 2026
9. iClarified, “OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health to all US users with Apple Health integration,” July 23, 2026
10. CMS, “Calendar Year (CY) 2027 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule” fact sheet, July 14, 2026