In order for your healthcare practice to remain efficient and competitive, it’s critical to adapt to the needs of the modern patient. You might find that offering in-practice care no longer meets the needs of some patients, while other patients prefer to travel less if where remote treatment options are available.

Remote patient monitoring can give your healthcare practice a new and improved way to delivery exceptional patient care. One that will be adored by patients and is easy to adopt by your practice.

Remote patient monitoring, also known as RPM, enables healthcare providers like yours to monitor patients’ health status from any location through a range of connected devices such as blood pressure monitors, blood glucose monitors, weight scales, and pulse oximeters, that patients can use to monitor their health measurements at home or any convenient location. The results are automatically transmitted to the Optimize Health platform where your practice can analyze the information to track changes in each patient’s health, adjusting their treatment plans as necessary.

RPM is primarily used to monitor chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, COPD, atrial fibrillation, and asthma, and can help to improve patient outcomes, increase patient engagement, and reduce healthcare costs.

Using Optimize Health’s remote patient monitoring software, your healthcare practice can give patients the ability to use connected devices to take their vital sign measurements at home or wherever is most convenient for them, and those readings are securely synced into your RPM software platform. Care team members monitor your patients’ readings each day, allowing you deliver preventative care by proactively intervening if a patient starts trending in the wrong direction.

Remote patient monitoring software provides you with the tools needs to consistently monitor patient health patterns and track the results over time, helping to prevent costly hospitalizations or trips to the emergency room.

Implementing remote patient monitoring is generally a very simply process. First, you should determine which patients would benefit from an RPM program and why. Typically, this will include patients with chronic conditions like hypertension, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, prediabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and more.

Once your list of RPM patients is defined, you should first seek consent from patients that they are happy to move towards a remote patient monitoring program. Once agreed, you will need to order the relevant devices for the patient, giving them training on how to take and upload readings.

Once the patient is trained on how to take their own readings, they can take their device home and begin the RPM program. Clinicians from your healthcare practice monitor each patient’s data which is sent to the Optimize Health platform. 5. Your office bills for RPM services using RPM CPT® Codes.

A remote patient monitoring platform allows you to provide preventative care to your patients outside of office visits and get reimbursed for providing this care to your patients. Combined, RPM delivers both better clinical and financial outcomes for patients and practices.

Clinical research shows RPM reduces hospital admissions, emergency room visits, and mortality rates. Studies also show that patients enrolled in RPM can significantly improve their vital signs, reducing their blood pressure or A1C levels.

RPM programs empower patients to take an active role in improving their health by involving them in their health each day. Your monitoring staff serve as their coaches and educators, helping to build rapport and trust that strengthens the patient-provider relationship.

RPM allows you to provide patient-centered care outside regular office visits and provide care to patients regardless of geographic location or proximity to your office. This can help patients who aren’t able to easily travel to office visits, live in more rural areas, or need more daily support with their chronic conditions.

New technologies aren’t without their challenges. Data from our recent survey of healthcare practitioners shows that the most prominent drawbacks of remote patient monitoring are related to barriers to adopting the technology.

Most physicians say that their biggest hurdles when implementing RPM are learning the technology, committing already busy resources to monitoring patients, and overcoming the challenges of getting patient buy-in.

Thankfully these are all quite easy to overcome which helps paint a picture of why nearly 8 in 10 (78%) physicians say they expect steady or increased patient demand for virtual care.

With staff resourcing in mind, providing patients with daily monitoring does indeed require an investment of clinical resources to provide the best results. However, it doesn’t have to be your own practice’s clinical staff. Optimize Health offers monitoring services where our nurses become an extension of your practice staff, conducting patient monitoring, providing health coaching, and communicating with your RPM patients regularly while providing your team with daily updates on patient progress.

Optimize Health can also support your practice with remote onboarding services to help you identify potential RPM patients, verify their insurance eligibility, ship devices to patients, and conduct onboarding appointments.

Thankfully, the technology is also simple to learn. Optimize Health’s remote patient monitoring platform was built for clinical environments and allows clinical teams to understand which patients need help based on criticality and priority. In addition, our clinical staffing team can conduct monitoring on behalf of your practice, escalating critical readings based on your practice’s preferred clinical workflows.