Remote Patient Monitoring — How It Benefits Healthcare Organisations & Patients

Key Takeaways

• Remote patient monitoring https://telegra.ph/How-remote-monitoring-can-take-health-care-to-the-next-level-08-31 (RPM) technologies have proven instrumental over the course of the pandemic, and their significance continues to be on the rise.
• RPM can be used in various types of digital healthcare solutions to make care more personalised and convenient.
• The key benefits of remote monitoring technology include operational efficiency, cost savings, improved access to care, higher quality of care, and medical staff support.
• The future of virtual care will centre around making patient engagement solutions more immersive.

What is Remote Patient Monitoring?

Remote patient monitoring is a method of delivering healthcare in a manner that leverages technology to monitor patients’ health outside of clinical settings. Solutions that make use of RPM capabilities digitally transmit data between patients and care providers. These types of applications are often introduced to improve personalised care and empower patients to take greater responsibility for their health.

Remote patient monitoring takes advantage of the latest technologies to collect patient data outside of healthcare institutions, enabling medical professionals to conduct remote diagnostics. These types of solutions proved especially valuable over the last couple of years when COVID-19 all but completely disrupted the health management process. During this time, technology-based remote tools played an important role in keeping both clinicians and patients safe.

How Does Remote Patient Monitoring Work?

Remote patient monitoring systems are used as a means of digital healthcare delivery, killgurubecomeguru.org which leverages technology to monitor patients’ health, like the name suggests—remotely. The healthcare ecosystem is broad and varied, and RPM is just one of the technologies being used to facilitate the electronic sharing of patient data with medical staff.

Common examples of remote diagnostics technology include:

• Glucose meters for diabetics.
• Heart rate and blood pressure monitors.
• Surveillance monitors for the mentally or physically impaired.
• Infertility monitoring and treatment.
• At-home substance abuse tests.
• Nutrition logs.

What distinguishes remote monitoring devices from other digital healthcare delivery methods is that RPM isn’t interactive and doesn’t require any audio or visual capabilities. Such devices must simply be capable of reliably collecting and lookali.de accurately interpreting patients’ physiological data.

In general, software for remote patient monitoring makes use of a multitude of different technologies but each device has certain commonplace components, such as sensors, local data storage, a central repository, and a data analysis functionality.

This type of health data collection offers patients the convenience of having access to professional medical care without having to attend clinics or any other medical facilities.

With many healthcare organisations having recognised these patient and caregiver benefits, it’s no surprise that according to a Forrester report, 4 out of 5 of the most valued healthcare technologies focus on digital patient engagement.

As a result of the tectonic changes brought on by the last couple of years, the primary user group of remote patient monitoring systems changed significantly, as it’s been widely expanded to include a varying range of patient profiles. However, even before COVID-19, remote monitoring technologies were already being leveraged by certain user groups, such as:

• Patients suffering from chronic diseases
• Patients with limited mobility
• Patients recovering from surgery
• Inhabitants of rural areas
• The elderly

RPM devices have been gaining significant momentum and have proven to be an important ally due to their ability to improve patient outcomes and the convenience of care.

The Top 5 Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring

The benefits of digital healthcare solutions such as RPM are abundant, both for clinicians and patients.For healthcare providers, remote health monitoring can be used to monitor and manage patients with acute, chronic, or highly infectious diseases—either instead of or in between clinical visits. Whereas for patients, RPM helps to ensure they are provided with the medical care they need from the comfort of their own homes.

1. Operational Efficiency

When facing emergencies, healthcare organisations often deal with certain challenges, such as overcrowding, medical equipment shortages, and having to force staff to put in extra hours. Leveraging RPM technologies helps to ease these issues, as it leads to a smaller number of in-person health visits.

2. Lower Costs

Remote patient monitoring systems can help healthcare organisations take better control of their spending and improve performance. The key to well-managed health processes is transparency and the ability to respond quickly. As RPM enables instantaneous communication, it has the power to prevent certain emergency situations and, thereby, avert unnecessary hospitalisations. This type of responsiveness and agility helps to keep things under control, which leads to a decrease in unexpected costs.

3. Improved Access

Access to medical care is a pressing issue in many countries around the world. Long waiting lists, limited appointment opportunities, and an uneven ratio of caregivers to patients are just some of the factors contributing to this issue. Fortunately, remote diagnostic technologies have the power to significantly increase caregivers’ capacity to treat patients and could optimise caregiving operations across entire healthcare organisations.

4. Higher Quality

Remote patient monitoring not only increases the number of actual caregiving opportunities — it can also enhance their quality. RPM devices provide medical professionals with factual, up-to-date patient data, often in real time, rendering the care provided timely and accurate. Moreover, employing RPM often generates greater patient engagement. Interacting with an RPM device makes patients more autonomous and accountable for their own health, which consequently leads to improved patient outcomes.

5. Medical Support

Patients, especially ones recovering from surgery, can be apprehensive about leaving the clinical environment to continue their recovery from home, as they will no longer be monitored by medical staff. They often worry that potential alarming symptoms may go unnoticed, leading to complications. Using RMP devices to track their symptoms during recovery provides patients with continued medical support.

The Future of Remote Patient Monitoring

In Gartner’s most recent healthcare and life sciences edition of the Hype Cycle, their analysis focuses on the technologies that are most likely to have the greatest influence on consumer engagement in 2022.

The Hype Cycle study urges any healthcare and life sciences organisation that wishes to remain competitive in today’s market to consider investing in consumer engagement technologies, such as RPM.

RPM Market Trends

The era of COVID-19 has accelerated the rise of virtual care and the technologies that make these new, digital facets of care possible, with recent data confirming that virtual care technologies are here to stay.

Nevertheless, the challenge faced by healthcare organisations today is how to seamlessly optimise their patients’ digital journeys in a way that will be both sufficient and satisfying. Video calls and messages are no longer enough to adequately address patients’ expectations when it comes to virtual care. In 2021, studies showed that healthcare organisations were increasing their investments in employing digital solutions like wearables and virtual health assistants. Whereas in 2022 and beyond, the trend points in the direction of making virtual care technologies more immersive.

With an increasing number of emerging remote diagnostic technologies and other initiatives aimed at enhancing patient engagement, the trend is clear — care is shifting focus to better cater to the patient.

If healthcare organisations are seeking to keep up with market standards, they should take a closer look at their operations to assess where technology innovations could enhance their efforts to provide high-quality, timely, and convenient care.