The use of remote patient monitoring is a highly effective way for healthcare providers to improve the quality of care and reduce the cost associated with visits. In addition, it can improve access to healthcare providers and overcome barriers to equity in healthcare and promote long term healthy living. This is an important issue in diversity-rich New Jersey, for example, where healthcare providers care for residents speaking upwards of 150 languages. Remote patient monitoring allows for constant access to health care providers without the need to inconvenience family members who act as translators during office visits.
Needs Assessment
The first step in remote patient monitoring is to assess your patient’s needs and barriers to care. This step should also result in identifying potential solutions that could address the identified needs and barriers to care.
You can use the following questions as a guide:
- What are the patient’s symptoms?
- How are they communicating with their healthcare providers? (online, phone, etc.)
- What devices do they have access to?
- Do they have reliable access to transportation to attend regular office visits?
Promotion of Patient Self-Sufficiency
One of the most important ways to promote self-sufficiency is to give patients the tools they need to do so. Remote patient monitoring can play a big role in this by enabling patients to take responsibility for their own health, giving them access to information about their condition, and empowering them with the ability to monitor their own symptoms and communicate with doctors when necessary.
Patients are often more willing to take responsibility for their own health management after receiving education on how technology works, how it can help them in their daily lives, how it can reduce unnecessary stress, and what actions they should take if something seems amiss. With these tools in hand, patients will be able to make informed decisions about when they need medical attention — without necessarily needing someone else around all day long just waiting for something bad to happen or resenting family members who constantly check-in on their condition.
Remote patient monitoring conditions patients to take daily stock of how they are feeling, what they are doing to improve their current health situation and how they feel when they don’t adhere to medical recommendations. This reflection will become habitual. Unfortunately, too often during regular office visits patients are asked to think back and recollect what they may have been doing when they felt discomfort — memories can’t always be trusted. But, with RPM, physicians don’t need to do this forensic research since the data will be in front of them so a more comprehensive discussion can take place during office visits.
Saving Time and Building Trust
Remote patient monitoring solutions can greatly reduce the need for clinicians to depend on a patient’s memories of what transpired with their health since their last visit and better utilizes the time spent during the current visit. This means more time with patients to perform a deeper dive into the data and focus on creating a plan to reach health goals. The Care Team members who are in place to help monitor important health data, outside of a clinic setting, are able to check in with patients and build connections. They can also provide valuable information to patients about how our bodies function on a daily basis. But just as important, meeting with a Care Team member allows the patient to feel “heard” and more in control of their health outcomes and provides a higher degree of activism regarding their own health.
