Q&A: Oura appoints its first chief medical officer

Health-tracking ring maker Oura announced today the appointment of Dr. Ricky Bloomfield as its first chief medical officer. Prior to this, he served as clinical and health informatics lead at Apple Health, where he oversaw the launch of several features, including Apple’s Health Records on the iPhone. 

Dr. Bloomfield spoke with MobiHealthNews about his new role, where he will lead the expansion of the company’s healthcare programs and partnerships, ensure regulatory compliance and collaborate with Oura’s team to develop new hardware and software features.

MobiHealthNews: What are your plans for Oura as the company’s first chief medical officer?

Dr. Ricky Bloomfield: Oura has already done a lot of great things, even before my arrival, and so kudos to the team for, I think, creating such a great product that is grounded in science and is super accessible. 

One of the things that really attracted me to Oura was that they really created the most accessible wearable device out there. It’s easy to wear 24/7. It is easy to wear at night. It lasts up to eight days on a charge, and it’s available to everyone regardless of their platform. I think that really unlocks some interesting opportunities in healthcare because when you want to work with an insurer or work with a health system or a health technology company, they want to be able to provide a product or service to everyone regardless of where they are, regardless of age or socioeconomic status or any other metric. 

As we look at the wearable ecosystem over time, it’s not that old and it has quickly gone from being a world where you have a few people, biohacker types wearing these devices as a curiosity now to super mainstream. Almost everyone you see walking around has some sort of device, and it’s offering insights to them on a daily basis. And now people are starting to bring those insights and information to their doctor and ask them, “Well, what do you think?” 

And so that’s really where I think we’re reaching this inflection point, and I’m hoping I can help the company really focus on those partnerships and opportunities that can really help improve the lives of as many people as possible. I think we all want to have the biggest impact we can, and I think this is where Oura is in a really unique position to try to capitalize on the momentum.

MHN: What type of partnerships do you think would be beneficial for Oura?

Bloomfield: Oura already has, actually, formed some of these partnerships. You probably saw announcements about Essence last year, Dexcom, and then most recently, Lumeris. And so you are already starting to get a sense for the type of partnerships that are out there with insurers, like Essence, who are really interested in improving the health of their populations overall, and that is very much aligned with our interests as well. 

And that’s a really complex and hard thing to do because everyone is different, everyone is at a different stage in their lives, and so there is a lot of work to do on both sides in order to identify how these metrics can be most beneficial, tie that to outcomes that the insurers are interested in, and tie it to outcomes that the health systems are interested in. There is still lots of discussion about value-based care, and how you can tie all these things together. And so I think we’re right in the middle of that, and trying to help figure this out with them. 

Healthcare is a team sport. It’s not something that one company can solve on its own, and so I think we have to approach this with humility and be open-minded about the best solutions, and that is why creating these partnerships, working with them is, I think, an opportunity for us to learn and also for them to benefit from the great data that these devices provide.

MHN: How can Oura help with remote patient monitoring? 

Bloomfield: Every remote patient monitoring situation is going to be a little bit different, and the needs are going to be different, of course, but…for example, if someone gets out of a surgery, you want to know, how well are they going to get back up to their pre-surgical baseline, as an example.

I’m just brainstorming here, just sharing some high-level thoughts not announcing any products or anything, but the data generated from the ring around your activity, your heart rate, how well you are sleeping, all of those are important for pretty much any intervention you could imagine. 

Understanding what was the baseline of the user beforehand, and how do we get back to that, and how do we have objective data to help us understand when we have arrived at that baseline? And so those are all things that are available today, and I think users are already seeing the impact of that data on their healthcare journey. 

MHN: You previously worked at Apple Health. How will your experience there transfer over to Oura? What do you bring with you that can benefit the company?

Bloomfield: Yeah, I loved my eight and a half years at Apple. The team is amazing, and they are going to continue to do amazing things. It was super exciting to be a part of that journey, and I think what it has taught me is the value of creating amazing and nuanced user experiences, helping meet users where they are and creating wearable products, and also helping them to get access to their data. 

Some of the work that I did there was helping users get access to their clinical data from health systems and clinics because it’s super valuable to have that access to your conditions or your clinical notes or your medications, your vital signs. 

And as we think about the future, about users and getting access to their own data, I think it is going to be really important to consider the whole person, and it is not just about the sensor data that they might get, but also about the clinical data and completing that picture.  

As our partnership with Dexcom has shown, there is this world of metabolic health and helping understand these objective metrics, like glucose in that example, and of course there are other lab values outside of that as well. 

So, as we think about bringing all these together, right now, you sort of have a painting that is half finished with the type of data that you have access to, and as we start to fill in parts of that painting to create that complete picture, then it enables a lot of downstream opportunities for preventative care and for more detailed guidance.  

One of the areas that is a huge focus for us is artificial intelligence. Of course, there’s a lot of hype out there right now; it’s definitely a buzz word, but what is important to us is how we can use these technologies to create meaningful improvements to someone’s health. And these AI technologies, of course, have been used throughout our products over time. All of the algorithms used for the ring, for all the metrics, are all based on machine learning models, which is a form of AI. 

When people talk about AI nowadays, they are often referring to generative AI and the large language models and these are technologies that do an incredible job pulling out insights from large amounts of data, but these models are also dependent on having good data, high-quality data. It is really garbage in, garbage out. So, when you can start with really high-quality data, like the Oura ring provides, you know, validated against clinical metrics like ECG and others for heart rate and HRV, then it really opens up opportunities for what you can do with these models if you compliment that high-quality sensor data with other data types. So, I’m really excited to bring all that together and to really create an AI experience that is personalized and meaningful for our users.