How Can Remote Patient Monitoring Make Care Delivery Patient-Centered with a FHIR-enabled Data Activation Platform?

Sandeep Gupta

Tue 15 Sep 2020

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Over the past decade, Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) has risen to new heights. Years of exploration caused this developing innovation to become more widely adopted in 2020, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a critical piece of technology that allowed care to be delivered at a distance when practices were shut down. RPM has made an impact on healthcare and has been pushed to mainstream care delivery due to the advantages that were noticed by providers and care teams.

With cutting edge innovation, providers can now follow their patients and use this information to anticipate which social determinants influence a patient's wellbeing. This allows healthcare providers to effectively treat their patients. Different provider organizations offer their own RPM instruments for their patients, which can be incorporated with their RPM software programs. External software solutions are utilized at times for deep analytics and easier workflow integration. Healthcare organizations are gathering crucial patient information to use predictive analytics to make care more patient-centered.

How Does Remote Patient Monitoring Work

Remote Patient Monitoring Technology gives patients much greater involvement in managing their health, eliminating nursing and hospitalization costs. The remote patient monitoring system is a healthcare delivery method that uses technology to monitor patient health outside of a traditional clinical setting. It collects biometric data (such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen levels, and sleep quality) from a patient’s location, then analyzes and interprets that data and transmits it to the caretaker at another location. RPM can undertake the same patient observations as a nurse at the bedside, so the unnecessary readmissions and appointments can be prevented. Integrated remote patient monitoring solutions with modern healthcare technology prove to be clinically effective symptom management tools and allow risk-bearing organizations to remotely monitor patients with chronic conditions to help reduce costs & readmission, improve care quality, and increase access to care for patients.

The Benefits of RPM

There are multiple advantages of implementing a remote patient monitoring system; they include:

Convenience and lowering healthcare costs
Preventing hospitalization and enabling doctors to manage their time better
Increased patient follow-through.

Providers using RPM-enabled home healthcare and other telehealth delivery methods are already reducing hospital readmission penalties. A study conducted by The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center showed that RPM reduced the risk of hospital readmissions by 76%. Moreover, the researchers observed that the technology held patient satisfaction scores over 90%. Many aged patients are driving positive ROI from RPM technology and home-based care, due to their high incidence of chronic diseases. A previous KLAS Research report that surveyed 25 healthcare organizations found 38% of healthcare organizations running RPM programs focused on chronic disease reported reduced admissions, and 17% cited cost reductions. Not only does RPM make it easier than ever for patients to collect health data, but it’s also easier for providers to get real-time patient health information and act on it, thereby reducing readmissions and lowering healthcare costs.

The Future

An important aspect of RPM technologies is the analytics of the data acquired by wearable devices or other RPM gadgets. This data can be utilized to run predictive analytics to help providers make informed choices about the patient's health. Innovaccer’s Remote Patient Monitoring Solution based on a FHIR-enabled Data Activation Platform allows this through an easy to use solution. With the solution, providers can effectively manage workflows and integrate actionable insights into the care protocols making care delivery more patient-centered and future-ready.