Remote patient monitoring provides continuous data, making remote patient monitoring beneficial to patients and providers in several ways. Real-time monitoring allows clinicians to quickly detect out-of-range or alarming readings, potentially helping prevent health crises and decreasing readmissions.
1. Better Patient Engagement
Remote patient monitoring enables physicians to track real-time health data with connected devices like pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors. Care providers can then act immediately if a patient’s condition changes suddenly, potentially preventing hospital readmissions.
Patients who engage regularly with their physicians are more likely to adhere to treatment plans, take medications as directed, and make healthy lifestyle changes. Text and mobile reminders help increase patient engagement.
2. Improved Quality of Care
Remote patient monitoring provides clinicians with essential insight into the health of their patients between office visits. Healthcare professionals can gain an in-depth view into nuances and changes to a patient’s condition and modify treatment programmes accordingly.
By doing so, they can avoid hospitalisations, extended stays and readmissions – alleviating healthcare systems of their burden while controlling healthcare costs and lowering risks related to deterioration and progression. RPM allows patients to reduce the cost of in-person appointments by eliminating costs such as travel, parking, childcare and time off work. RPM also enables healthcare providers to reach rural patients on schedule while staying true to treatment plans.
3. Reduced Healthcare Costs
Remote patient monitoring solutions equip patients with tools to track symptoms, health data, and recovery progress while receiving personalised, just-in-time education that encourages engagement with and adherence to care pathways.
Clinicians equipped with access to real-time patient data can quickly spot out-of-range or alarming trends and modify management programmes accordingly, helping reduce health emergencies and readmissions as well as overall healthcare costs. RPM offers another important advantage – eliminating barriers such as transportation and childcare costs while freeing up precious work time for physical visits, thus making it a viable healthcare solution for underserved populations in rural areas.
4. Enhanced Patient Confidence
Remote patient monitoring enables healthcare providers to view data in real-time, streamlining their workload and providing an easier way for them to assess and respond to changes. Being able to quickly detect out-of-range readings or symptoms that might indicate medical distress could prevent needless hospitalisations, emergency room visits or medical emergencies for their patients.
RPM also helps ease pressure on overburdened healthcare systems by eliminating needless in-person appointments and freeing up space for more urgent care – 70% of midwives and obstetricians who used remote monitoring during gestation reported that its use improved preventative care services.
5. Reduced Hospitalizations
Remote monitoring offers healthcare practitioners an effective means of overseeing patient care at home. It has proven its worth in helping reduce hospital readmissions and emergency department (ED) visits, thus significantly decreasing healthcare costs overall.
RPM can also detect potential health issues early, often before they progress to become serious problems. When identified early enough, treatment costs become significantly more cost-effective. Telehealth services provide patients with more convenience, reducing missed appointments and freeing up time for healthcare organisations to see new patients – creating an extra revenue source that can make an incredible difference to any practice.
6. Improved Patient-Physician Relationships
Telehealth gives physicians a new opportunity to build trust and engage their patients, ultimately leading to more successful patient outcomes because patients feel motivated to follow advice given from their physician.
RPM devices such as blood pressure and heart rate monitors, glucose meters, smart inhalers, apnoea monitors and maternity care monitors collect and transmit their data directly into user-friendly platforms that can be monitored by physician and nurse care teams – thus eliminating barriers to preventive healthcare such as travel distance and lack of primary care providers.
7. Enhanced Patient Education
Remote patient monitoring provides providers with access to more reliable information than that collected via intermittent, in-person office visits, allowing them to observe patterns that might signal worsening health and take measures to head off any crises that require costly emergency care services.
Regular alerts from medical devices (like glucose levels for diabetes or blood pressure measurements for hypertension patients) are more likely to stick with their medications and lifestyle plans in-between appointments, improving overall health. As a result, patients become more invested in their healthcare, deepening the patient-physician relationship and increasing customer loyalty.
8. Improved Patient Self-Management
At a time when healthcare costs are skyrocketing and physician shortages become more evident, remote patient monitoring provides physicians an opportunity to deliver care to more patients at lower costs while relieving stress from both patient and provider alike. This helps relieve tension for all involved and enhance the quality of care delivered.
RPM gives healthcare practitioners a real-time view of physiologic changes in their patients, enabling them to respond more rapidly if anything arises – from out-of-range values or alarming readings, altering management plans or treatment options, preventing readmissions or complications and more. Patients also benefit from improved self-management, as they can communicate any concerns or issues to their care team in a timely manner. This can increase engagement, adherence, and interest in their healthcare regimen.
9. Improved Patient Safety
Before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, remote patient monitoring was becoming an effective means to manage chronic healthcare conditions. Thanks to changes to CPT codes, RPM has become even more prominent as physicians and nonphysician providers able to offer evaluation and management (E/M) services were allowed to bill Medicare for telemonitoring services.
Remote patient monitoring provides clinicians with access to health data at any time, making it possible to quickly detect changes in patients’ conditions and take proactive measures as quickly as possible. It also gives patients peace of mind knowing their physician is always watching out.
