What is a Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) onboarding event? An onboarding event involves dedicating staff time and rooms exclusively to RPM onboarding appointments for one or more days. This focus can enable you to ramp your RPM program quickly, allowing more patients to benefit from RPM immediately.
Why Have an Onboarding Event?
Without an onboarding event, many practices struggle to get RPM off the ground. They may add a few patients during their routine visits once they have RPM devices, but without the opportunity for the entire office team to work together to create RPM processes, it stalls.
An onboarding event is a great opportunity to partner with your RPM vendor to really learn how to make RPM successful in your practice. By carving out dedicated time for RPM, your team will quickly become very knowledgeable, learn what works well for your patients, and be comfortable carrying the processes you established forward.
How to Conduct an Onboarding Event
Below are the four key steps to planning and executing a successful RPM onboarding event.
Step 1. Identify Potential RPM Patients
The patients you select will depend on the devices that you have chosen. It’s also important to think about your RPM goals and your practice’s patient population. For example, let’s say you are planning to monitor hypertensive patients with blood pressure devices. You should consider if you want to grow quickly and consider all patients with hypertension as RPM-eligible or prioritize those patients with the most need, such as patients with uncontrolled hypertension or patients that are non-compliant with their medication.
Insurance coverage is also an important consideration. Medicare covers RPM but a patient without supplemental insurance may be responsible for copays. Many commercial insurers also cover RPM and your RPM provider should be able to provide an eligibility verification service.
Step 2: Schedule RPM Appointments
The key to a successful onboarding event is getting a critical mass of patients onboarded to RPM in a short time frame. Depending on your practice, that could mean 20 patients or 50. This repetition of RPM onboarding in a single day means your team will have plenty of opportunities to practice talking to patients about RPM.
To achieve this, your staff (clinical or admin) must schedule at least one full day of appointments specifically for RPM onboarding. Your RPM partner should be able to provide a script that explains the benefits of RPM and includes answers to potential objections to facilitate scheduling.
Step 3: Prepare for the Onboarding Event
The more setup that is completed in advance of the onboarding event, the smoother things will go. For example, collecting patient consent forms and RPM orders can avoid last-minute scrambles and delays while the patient is in the office.
A crucial element of preparation is dedicating enough clinical staff for the onboarding event. We strongly recommend that your staff members conducting the onboarding event be 100% dedicated to RPM for the day(s) of the event.
Your RPM customer success team should step-by-step coaching for your clinical staff before and during the onboarding event. Depending on the size of the onboarding event, they often attend the actual event at your clinic. They have seen what works and what doesn’t with patient onboarding and can provide guidance on setting up processes that will work for your practice.
Step 4: Conduct RPM Appointments
Now it’s time to conduct the actual onboarding appointment. This is the time to educate the patient about RPM and set expectations for their ongoing participation. When done well, the ongoing process sets the foundation for ongoing patient and engagement. Patients should leave the appointment feeling fully confident in how to use their device and understanding the expectations for regular readings and communication with your clinical staff.
After conducting thousands of onboarding appointments, we are happy to share some practical, concrete, simple tips that can really make the difference between a good and great RPM experience for the patient.
After Your Onboarding Event
While the onboarding appointment is the time to set the patient up for success, it’s critical to keep the momentum going by starting monitoring outreach the very next day. If you are concerned that your staff does not have time to contact every RPM patient daily, consider managed RPM services that can act as an extension of your own clinical staff.
While an onboarding event can give your program a quick ramp, it certainly isn’t the end of onboarding. Your practice is likely seeing many patients every day that can benefit from RPM. We recommend scanning upcoming appointments daily or weekly to identify potential RPM patients. Once those patients are flagged, an RPM onboarding can be added to their scheduled appointment.
Ready to Learn More?
If you want to learn more about best practices for effective onboarding, check out our webinar RPM Patient Identification and Onboarding Done Right or schedule a free consultation with an RPM expert. We’d be happy to talk about how to host a successful RPM Onboarding Event at your practice or answer RPM questions in general.