Today we can see a number of challenges associated with patient care like incomplete medical office assessments, insufficient collaboration with patients, difficulties with monitoring patient adherence, slow treatment plan adjustment that requires in-person appointments with healthcare providers. All that contributes to poor health outcomes. Remote Patient Monitoring is one of the ways to increase efficiency of healthcare entities and improve patients results. The seniors and patients with chronic conditions can particularly benefit from remote patient monitoring solutions. 

Challenges

• Incomplete office assessment & access to data

In-person assessments that happen in the office of the healthcare providers and the vital signs scanning are not always accurate. They don’t provide the overall picture on the disease or chronic conditions that healthcare providers can base their decisions on. And the patients are not always having access to all their medical data, so they can take their measurements at home and compare with in-office results. 

• Follow up delays and slow treatment plan adjustments 

It takes time to book an appointment with healthcare providers. According to the data provided by Fraser Institute, in Canada the waiting time from referral by a practitioner to an appointment with specialist is around 8.7 weeks, and it can take additional 10 weeks to have all the necessary procedures made and finally to get a treatment. In the US the average waiting time for an appointment is 18 days. This results in high therapeutic inertia which is an inability to adjust treatment plans in a timely and frequent enough manner. 

• Low patient adherence and difficulties to monitor it in a continuous manner

The patient calls to get the readings and adherence assessments are time intensive and not scalable. There is no constant interaction with customers, neither medical and pill reminders, so there is not enough collaboration so that patients can monitor and adjust their treatment accordingly to some extent by themselves. 

• Reimbursement issues for the remote monitoring you already provide

Clinicians, physicians and other healthcare providers are constantly making calls to check on their patients or notify them about latest lab results. All this amount of work and time they spend in the case of each specific patient is not always refunded and compensated for accordingly. 

Remote Patient Monitoring benefits 

• Improve health outcomes 

According to The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Remote Patient Monitoring and Telehealth systems contribute to the decrease in hospital readmissions by 76%. We can also see improved health outcomes due to the early illness detection, more accurate readings that you could see in the progression, continuous patient monitoring. The timely intervention of healthcare providers helps to avoid disease progression, serious health consequences and death. 

• Increase patient satisfaction, engagement & adherence 

Remote Patient Monitoring platforms result in 90% patient satisfaction. By having access to their vital measurements, patients keep their health under control. Being observed they also tend to make healthier decisions, take their medications regularly, measuring their vitals signs more often. So overall they are more engaged in the activities improving their health outcomes. When patients are getting more feedback from healthcare providers about their treatment, reasoning behind changing a medication and overview of trends that led to this decision, they are more open to collaborate and take the treatment advice more seriously. Getting pill and other medical reminders, knowing that their data is shared with clinicians, physicians, nurses and PSWs provides a comforting effect on patients, a sense of accountability and security. It also gives patients an efficient access to the health providers. 

• Complements in person care 

RPM provides a rich data analysis with healthcare reports, dashboards, notifications and alerts. It allows physicians to track how much time they spend on each particular customer, so it can be further reported to Medicare for refunds. The asynchronous care provided in combination with synchronous communication with patients saves time of the healthcare providers and increases their efficiency. If escalation or discontinuation of medical therapies is needed it can be done remotely. 

• Provides more vigilant control of your patients 

The chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer’s, fall issues can be kept under control due to the remote monitoring. By seeing the whole picture instead of just fragments of data which is usually the case with only in-office appointments, healthcare providers can make more informed decisions and better prioritize their patients depending on their health status. 

• Becomes a new standard for chronic care management 

Digital transformation has accelerated due to the COVID-19 and we can already see a great number of positive feedback from patients. The recent survey conducted by Software Advice company showed that 78% of patients with chronic conditions are very interested in using RPM devices and expect the doctors to frequently or constantly monitor their data. With the raising interest to RPM which expects to grow by 28.2% from 2020 to 2024, the implementation of RPM can help your practice to attract more patients and increase the loyalty of existing ones.