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More and more clinicians are seeing the value of remote patient monitoring equipment and services. Therefore, the adoption rate is expanding. According to a survey by VivaLNK, 43% of clinicians believe that the adoption of RPM will be on par with inpatient care within five years. The benefits of remote patient monitoring for clinicians include easy access to patient data, better management of chronic diseases, lower costs, and increased efficiency.
In terms of patients, people are increasingly satisfied with RPM and other technical support services, but a Deloitte 2020 survey found that 56% of respondents believe that compared with online medical consultations, they get the same The quality or value of care. People visit.
Dr. Saurabh Chandra, director of telemedicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), said that the RPM program has several benefits for patients, including better access to care, improved health outcomes, lower costs, and improved quality of life.
“Any patient with a chronic disease will benefit from RPM,” Chandra said. Clinicians usually monitor patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and asthma.
RPM healthcare devices capture physiological data, such as blood sugar levels and blood pressure. Chandra said that the most common RPM devices are blood glucose meters, pressure meters, spirometers, and weight scales that support Bluetooth. The RPM device sends data through an application on the mobile device. For patients who are not tech-savvy, medical institutions can provide tablets with the application enabled-patients just need to turn on the tablet and use their RPM device.
Many vendor-based applications can be integrated with electronic health records, allowing medical institutions to create their own reports based on the data or use the data for billing purposes.
Dr. Ezequiel Silva III, a radiologist at the South Texas Radiological Imaging Center and a member of the American Medical Association’s Digital Medical Payment Advisory Group, said that some RPM devices can even be implanted. An example is a device that measures pulmonary artery pressure in patients with heart failure. It can be connected to a digital platform to inform the patient of the patient’s status and at the same time notify the members of the care team so that they can make decisions on how to manage the patient’s health.
Silva pointed out that RPM devices are also useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing patients who are not severely ill to measure their oxygen saturation levels at home.
Chandra said that suffering from one or more chronic diseases may cause disability. For those who do not have access to consistent care, illness can be a management burden. The RPM device allows doctors to understand the patient’s blood pressure or blood sugar level without the patient entering the office or making a phone call.
“If any indicator is at a particularly high level, someone can call and contact the patient and advise whether they need to be upgraded to an internal provider,” Chandra said.
Surveillance can reduce the hospitalization rate in the short term and prevent or delay the complications of the disease, such as microvascular stroke or heart attack, in the long term.
However, collecting patient data is not the only goal of the RPM program. Patient education is another important component. Chandra says that these data can empower patients and provide them with the information they need to help them change their behavior or lifestyle to create healthier results.
As part of the RPM program, clinicians can use smartphones or tablets to send patients educational modules specific to their needs, as well as daily tips on the types of foods to eat and why exercise is important.
“This enables patients to receive more education and take responsibility for their health,” Chandra said. “Many good clinical results are the result of education. When talking about RPM, we must not forget this.”
Reducing visits and hospitalizations through RPM in the short term will reduce healthcare expenditures. RPM can also reduce long-term costs associated with complications, such as the cost of evaluation, testing, or procedures.
He pointed out that many parts of RPM in the United States lack primary care providers, which enables clinicians to better reach patients, collect health data, provide medical management, and achieve satisfaction that patients are cared for while providers meet their indicators. He says.
“More and more primary care physicians are able to meet their targets. There are some financial incentives to meet these targets. Therefore, patients are happy, providers are happy, patients are happy, and providers are happy because of the increased financial incentives, “He says.
However, medical institutions should be aware that medical insurance, Medicaid and private insurance do not always have the same reimbursement policies or inclusion criteria, Chandra said.
Silva said that it is important for clinicians to work with hospital or office billing teams to understand the correct report code.
Chandra said that the biggest challenge in implementing the RPM plan is to find a good supplier solution. Supplier applications need to integrate with EHR, connect various devices and generate customizable reports. Chandra recommends looking for a supplier that provides quality customer service.
Finding eligible patients is another major consideration for healthcare organizations interested in implementing RPM programs.
“There are hundreds of thousands of patients in Mississippi, but how do we find them? At UMMC, we work with different hospitals, clinics and community health centers to find eligible patients,” Chandra said. “We must also propose inclusion criteria to determine which patients are eligible. This range should not be too narrow, because you don’t want to exclude too many people; you want to benefit most people.”
He also recommended that the RPM planning team contact the patient’s primary care provider in advance, so that the patient’s participation is not surprising. In addition, obtaining the provider’s approval may cause the provider to recommend other eligible patients to participate in the program.
As the adoption of RPM becomes more and more popular, there are also ethical considerations in the medical community. Silva said that the increasing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning algorithms applied to RPM data can produce a system that, in addition to physiological monitoring, can also provide information for treatment:
“Think of glucose as a basic example: if your glucose level reaches a certain point, it may indicate that you need a certain level of insulin. What role does the doctor play in it? We make these types of devices independent of doctor input Are the decisions satisfied? If you consider applications that may or may not use AI with ML or DL algorithms, then these decisions are made by a system that is continuously learning or locked in, but based on the training data set. Here are Some important considerations. How are these technologies and interfaces used for patient care? As these technologies become more common, the medical community has a responsibility to continue to evaluate how they affect patient care, experience, and outcomes.”
Chandra said that Medicare and Medicaid reimburse RPM because it can reduce the cost of chronic disease care by preventing hospitalization. The pandemic highlighted the importance of remote patient monitoring and prompted the federal government to introduce new policies for health emergencies.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded RPM’s medical insurance coverage to include patients with acute illnesses and new patients as well as existing patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a policy that allows the use of FDA-approved non-invasive devices to monitor vital signs in a remote environment.
It is not clear which allowances will be cancelled during the emergency and which will be retained after the emergency ends. Silva said that this question requires careful study of the results during the pandemic, the patient’s response to the technology, and what can be improved.
The use of RPM equipment can be extended to preventive care for healthy individuals; however, Chandra pointed out that funding is not available because CMS does not reimburse this service.
One way to better support RPM services is to expand coverage. Silva said that although the fee-for-service model is valuable and patients are familiar with, coverage may be limited. For example, CMS clarified in January 2021 that it will pay for the equipment supply within 30 days, but it must be used for at least 16 days. However, this may not meet the needs of every patient, putting some expenses at risk of not being reimbursed.
Silva said that the value-based care model has the potential to create some downstream benefits for patients and achieve high-quality results to justify the use of remote patient monitoring technology and its costs.
Post time: Jun-25-2021