What Is Remote Patient Monitoring: The Full Guide for 2023

Remote medical services delivery is the key purpose of the telehealth industry. The number of directions and solutions on the market in this domain is pretty impressive. Let's look at the main branches of modern medicine in combination with innovative software solutions:

Telecare, or telehealthcare, is the use of technology to remotely monitor patients' health and provide healthcare services. In the context of remote patient monitoring, telecare refers to the use of various digital devices and platforms to track and transmit patients' health data to healthcare providers for monitoring and analysis. This can include devices such as wearable sensors, smartphones, and tablets, as well as cloud-based platforms for storing and analyzing health data.

Telemedicine is often mentioned as a synonym to disclose remote medical institution's services delivery, such as appointment holding and distant therapy, yet, remote patient monitoring definition isn't the same.

Internet of Things (IoT) within the medical industry is integral for the RPM solutions and serves as the whole concept's base. This refers to smart gadgets that make remote monitoring in the healthcare services delivery possible, giving way to the potential of assisting clients. In RPM, smart IoT-based devices ensure distant health tracking, keeping patients healthy and help physicians provide 24/7 medical services.

IoT integration has made the remote medical services delivery possible, raised patient treatment experience and content, as interactions with doctors have become easier and more efficient. Apart from this, remote patient monitoring service can partially liquidate queues for the appointments as well as re-admissions. Healthcare institutions, in turn, have the opportunity to cut down operational costs having perfect therapy results.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can substantially renovate the telehealth industry, and the adoption of this technology is now realized in a range of medical sectors and directions.

AI can serve as an excellent tool for the analysis of vast data loads and visualizing them to deliver to medical institutions. Apart from this, such technology is able to provide disease diagnosing as well as or even better than completing this process manually.

By implementing Machine Learning (ML) in the healthcare industry, physicians are able to prescribe proper personalized treatment medicines that are aimed at curing certain health issues for each patient. Implementation of ML allows medical institutions to receive insights based on electronic data records for clients.

AI/ML-based smart assistants are able to automate the more simple tasks within the treatment process, allowing to allocate the human resources more wisely. Such technologies are an easy path to delivering homecare services and supporting patients 24/7.

One more valuable healthcare direction is RPM. Remote patient monitoring definition and concept differ from the other aforementioned technologies, serving as a separate branch. It is worth mentioning that remote patient monitoring in healthcare is considered to be a subset of telehealth. Besides, such software is not an element of telemedicine.

According to the recent insights generated by Insider Intelligence, the number of RPM users in the US for 2022 is equal to 45.1 million. Besides, forecasts state that within the following three years, this number is expected to reach 70.6 million.

What is remote monitoring of patients? It refers to distant physiologic tracking, engaging digital solutions to observe and capture medical and other health data provided by patients and deliver it to medical vendors. Healthcare providers analyze the data and, in case it's required, ensure consultation and guidance to clients.

Prior to the global pandemic, the remote monitoring medical sector was already finding its adoption. Needless to say, the level of COVID-19 disease has resulted in an increased need to isolate people while providing effective therapy.

Therefore, remote monitoring in healthcare is a promising method of providing therapy and delivering medical services. By analyzing the statistics, we can conclude that these solutions will continue to find their application in medical institutions and in the healthcare industry as a whole.

So what is remote patient monitoring, and how does it work? RPM is a method of homecare that enables clients to apply mobile medical gadgets and software solutions to assemble patient-generated health data (PCHD) for further transmission to medical providers and consultation. Therefore, patients individually track and record the health-related data at diverse points on a daily basis. After that, it is securely delivered to their therapists.

Next, healthcare experts (primarily medical establishments, intensive care units, and nursing facilities) or any other medical vendors analyze and evaluate the patient's health data regularly to correct the treatment and provide efficient therapy. Frequent treatment protocol modifications help guarantee the therapy effectiveness, instant alerts to edit prescriptions, or indication to visit the ER in case of a necessity.

When a patient leaves the medical facility, RPM equipment enables vendors to track clients' health conditions, often eliminating regular physical appointment conduction.

There is a range of remote healthcare monitoring methods, as well as an applied device or tracked health issues. However, the RPM solution comprises similar elements.

The main frequently used device is a wireless sensor measuring certain physiological indicators (to illustrate electrocardiograms, blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, blood oxygen, heart rate, etc.). It is also able to keep the assembled records. This digital repository is traditionally integrated into medical vendor databases software.

The market now offers a wide variety of devices for patient health tracking. These include smart bracelets, mini monitors, and many different gadgets. For example, smart patches, which are stickers with miniature sensors and electrical circuits that can be glued to the skin or applied to it as a temporary tattoo. The "smart" patch not only monitors the patient's current state, but can also independently supply the necessary amount of medicine to the body. The patch, designed for the safety of patients who, for example, may forget to take the necessary pill, is able to administer the medicine in certain portions, as well as to stop its delivery when necessary (for example, if the concentration of medicine in the body has reached the optimum level).

However, more traditional are smart bracelets that can measure blood pressure, heart rate, activity, and many other indicators. In practice, these are mostly smart watches that are used in integration with the iOS Health Kit and Google Kit.

When it comes to applications, they commonly comprise the functionality that allows physicians to monitor and assess health data. Patients are able to open and observe therapy details.

Oftentimes, the remote patient devices have the alerting feature implemented to notify a medical vendor to take a look at the records or determine the health issue that requires physical consultation.

Therefore, the RPM use cases comprise:

• Collecting physical/mental personal data, transferring it to more classic applications, processing those details and gathering them to the dashboard, as well as alerting doctors or caregivers when indicators are too far out of normal range.
• Measuring from smartwatches, fitness trackers, custom sensors to measure something specific (e.g., pain levels)
• Tracking indore and outdoors locations of people with mental illnesses that are incapacitated (e.g., Alzheimer's disease)

Remote monitoring in healthcare is a process that involves collecting and processing health data from a vast number of devices in order to obtain accurate indicators of patients' medical conditions. Due to this fact, it can't be performed without a custom digital system implementing an extended functionality.

RPM is a handy tech tool that combines all records and insights into one convenient environment. The modern medical market has a diversity of successful remote patient monitoring healthcare solutions. Let's consider some of them:

HealthSnap is a large remote medical monitoring solution. It combines Virtual Care and Lifestyle Data insights. The main purpose of HealthSnap is to enable patients to communicate with medical providers via a handy solution.

HealthSnap has obtained high credibility among the audience for secure medical data assembling and processing. Doctors apply this platform to provide efficient and accurate therapy to clients suffering from chronic health problems.

Vivify Health integrates interrelated gadgets and other solutions, allowing to monitor patients' medical indicators distantly. The key objective of the platform is to decrease the number of clients that require to visit the emergency room with the need for urgent interferences, this way cutting down the entire medical outgoings.

The organization also assists clients having a range of health issues, like diabetes and asthma, engaging medical tools such as handled blood pressure cuffs and wireless weight scales in its service.

CareSignal allows detecting increasing risk by remote monitoring of patients. This solution's main goal is to increase vendor operation within value-based care. The robotized and scalable solution provides an opportunity to interact with medical teams getting real-time alerts, whereas patients are able to communicate via calls or chat.

CipherHealth is a cloud-based platform for assisting medical establishments in gathering patients' feedback, holding patient appointments, booking follow-ups, and operating a row of other tasks on a full-fledged centralized system. Employees are able to customize a message or email notifications to set consultation reminders and distant healthcare service delivery.

Below you may find some valuable benefits brought by the remote monitoring healthcare platforms:

Decreasing operational costs

The primary reason to implement healthcare remote patient monitoring is operational cost decrease. Due to the Jungleworks analysis, RPM adoption can raise the number of saved costs by approximately $700 billion within the following fifteen to twenty years in the telemedicine market sector.

Increased usage of the RPM solutions prevents the need to reach the healthcare establishment on a daily basis physically. Therapists can track the patients' health state remotely and provide essential appointments via a handy application.

In the same way, the medical institutions and nursing facilities have the opportunity to reduce expenses, as well as physical appointments’ necessity substantially. Besides, health insurance vendor CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) has expressed support for remote patient monitoring by delivering a range of reimbursements to the medical specialists.

Chronic health issues monitoring

An Empirical Study of Chronic Diseases in the United States has shown that the number of patients struggling with some type of chronic health issue has crossed 45% . What's more, according to the Fighting Chronic Disease research, 75% of the medical expenses are taken by chronic illnesses.

Distant patient caring solutions and gadgets are able to help cut down costs by assembling a range of client-generated records. Having such data on hand, physicians are able to monitor the chronic illnesses' current conditions and assess their dynamics to prescribe proper treatment.

Reduced load towards the medical sector

The workload taken over by medical establishments can be processed via the RPM platforms. Ernst and Young state that 65% of medical specialists have claimed that the aforementioned technologies efficiently cut down the employees' strain at diverse enterprise levels within the healthcare sector.

Expanded users' coverage

After overcoming the worldwide virus spreading, RPM solutions will remain highly valuable. In particular, their application will be integral for distant locations and regions where the opportunity to reach the clinic is challenging.

Dwellers of rural regions are the primary definition of remote patient monitoring necessity. Population in such places can benefit from RPM technologies in order to securely and rapidly receive recommendations from healthcare experts. To put it in practice, patients struggling with chronic heart disease or any stage of diabetes can receive consultation via distant tracking devices.

Developing medical business potential

Regardless of the financial contribution requirement for the software development as well as all the obligatory equipment provided, the costs will be quickly recouped due to the RPM solidity and robustness. Remote patient monitoring is a tool that optimizes the medical services delivery and will bring expanded opportunities unavailable prior to the technology's implementation.

What is remote patient monitoring used for within the global pandemic? Its crucial target within the COVID-19 crisis is to isolate patients and contribute to the productive remote curing process. In this case, the waiting time for clients is entirely liquidated, resulting in a raised customer satisfaction rate.

What is remote health monitoring? Primarily it implies a high client orientation. Thus, patients also benefit from this technology:

24/7 support regardless of the current location

The RPM software delivers online data regarding medical indicators. As a result, clients are able to contact their doctors and receive a consultation at any time and from any point on the map:

Personal medical data accessibility

With an RPM platform, patients are able to see the dynamic therapy and prescription details through the user-friendly system. Comprehensive insights allow the audience to receive more information concerning the treatment and the individual health records.

Moreover, RPM enables patients to choose the most convenient time and use self-serving appointment reservations.

Time-consuming travel elimination

The homecare approach successfully liquidates the need to spend time getting to the medical institution. Even in case the clinic placement is far, RPM's high accessibility enables conducting consultations online without binding to the specific place to attend for medical recommendations’ receiving.

What details should be taken into account when developing an RPM? The following list describes some integral aspects to take into account when implementing remote patient monitoring and maximally benefiting from it.

Before implementing the system, it is worthwhile to think about what goals you are pursuing, what industry-specific challenges you want to solve, and what value it will bring to all parties in the medical sector.

Not only does the securitization of private health data processing increase the credibility of the platform, but it is also a necessary aspect of compliance. Weak securitization can lead not only to revenue losses but also to problems with the law. A competent software development vendor can help you choose the right tech stack to maximize the level of protection and prevention of hacking activities for your product.

For better orientation and navigation of users in a digital product, it is worth implementing onboarding, which describes the features of the application functionality. This activity will increase customer engagement, as they will be able to get the maximum use of your platform.

A mandatory activity for implementing RPM software in your business will be the training of your medical team. Explain in detail how it works, how to use the features correctly, and how to interact with patients through the digital product. This way, employees won't avoid using the platform but instead will be able to simplify their workflows with the RPM system.

In order to bill and pay customers through a digital solution, a payment gateway must be integrated. This functionality will not only monetize the platform but also allow payments to be made quickly and securely without leaving the application.

Ever-changing guidelines and legislative acts increase the complexity of complying with them. However, medical businesses must meet their requirements to get permission on healthcare software solution operation. In addition, regulations differ from region to region and depend on local governments. Each medical institution should precisely explore the acts mentioned below to understand which one is appropriate according to the country in the RPM solution will be launched:

• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). It controls the privacy of medical data transmission
• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This is an act obligatory for Europe that is related to the healthcare records' confidentiality. It is present in every software solution that processes private user data.
• USCDI (United States Core Data for Interoperability). It refers to an act that manages relations of a client as well as a medical institution.
• FIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). It's a special guideline verifying information processing via APIs (for telehealth products).

In developing a remote patient monitoring system, you have two options:

Choose off-the-shelf (readymade) solutions that have limited functionality but lower costs. The features in such software products may not fully cover all your business requirements. The usage of off-the-shelf software reduces the security of patient monitoring data since you primarily depend on a third party. Such a substantial disadvantage may lead to unpleasant consequences, such as insufficient protection from hacking activities and the subsequent financial as well as trust losses. However, they are pretty cost-efficient and easy to implement.

Creating a product from scratch that fully reflects your company's needs and has the appropriate functionality. This option implies solid security and full compliance with all necessary guidelines and regulations required for the healthcare industry. This approach considerably increases the quality of the remote patient monitoring (RPM) solution and makes it competitive within the market. Keep in mind that custom healthcare product architecture can be completed successfully only in partnership with IT vendors who have a solid experience in the telemedicine domain.

Outsourcing is a great option to get all the benefits of custom development of an RPM (remote patient monitoring) product at a reasonable cost. This type of partnership allows you to invest in the amount of work done without covering expenses like office rent, regular payrolls, hardware, and software purchasing. In this case, you hire a remote team that is already assembled, with solid experience and competence in software development, which helps to implement and deploy the product much faster.

When applying to outsource, you should keep in mind that the higher price doesn't reflect the same performance. You may select the region with adequate costs yet, get the remaining top-class services' quality. To illustrate, Estonia is a solid tech hub with many developers possessing solid expertise in software development. By choosing an outsourcing team from this country, you will be delivered with a patient remote monitoring solution of the highest quality, meeting all your individual requirements.

Cleveroad is an outsourcing tech company with proven in-depth experience in custom healthcare development. We deliver software solutions built from scratch for the medical business. Potent security, workflow streamlining, smooth data transmission, and valuable insights are the primary benefits delivered by digital solutions from Cleveroad.

Let us prove our competence in telehealth software architecture by introducing one of our projects:

We’ve designed the IoT-based system of hyman hydration monitoring in real-time. It’s a software solution for a hardware IoT devices that track the hydration level in a patient’s body and enables to tract it for healthcare and wellness purposes. Our customer is a US-based scientific and commercial company that provides an loT-based telecare solution for tracking human hydration levels. Our customer who delivers IoT-powered telecare solutions required a solution that enables users to track hydration indicators from mobile devices, complying with the 510 (k) FDA Medical Device Registration guidelines.

As an output, we’ve designed a platform that enables users to monitor hydration levels from mobile gadgets available on any operating system. Besides, our tech engineers have provided the integration with the client’s Paas (Product-as-a-Service) platform and an obligatory compliance. In addition, the Cleveroad team has delivered maintenance and support services to our client allowing to extend the current network of partner enterprises.