Remote Patient Monitoring for Chronic Diseases Part 1: Innovative Clinicians are Essential Team Members for Success
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) can shift care from the clinic and acute care setting to home, improving outcomes and access, and reducing costs. However, to be effective for chronic illness, the physiological measures obtained by RPM must be woven into a thoughtful approach to digital health care delivery. This means that the data drive the right actions, by the right people or system, at the right time, leading to improved health outcomes and ideally reduced healthcare spending.
The Challenge of Pairing RPM with the Right Care
While many RPM solutions can effectively monitor and transmit physiological data (their basic function), they only truly succeed when they satisfy several important criteria. Assuming a company has arrived at a fitting RPM solution after first gaining a deep understanding of the problem to be addressed (more on this in a later post), it is essential that the data obtained (1) are integrated with the ideal system (and people) that will act in response to those data,(2) are clearly actionable, and (3) the actions taken improve outcomes and/or reduce healthcare costs. Creating a solution that achieves these aims is a key challenge companies face — and a key opportunity to utilize innovative clinician advisors.
Innovative Front-line Clinicians are Essential RPM Startup Team Members
Navigating these challenges necessitates the integration of a clinical team member who is active in front-line medicine, yet can translate that knowledge into industry innovation, and can think creatively and thoughtfully around designing a solution that satisfies the needs of patients, clinicians, and payers. These individuals can help define care pathways and anticipate issues in implementation to accelerate progress and avoid costly pitfalls and setbacks.
Consider this example of a flawed RPM intervention from earlier this year:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2791681
At first glance, an intervention of remote patient monitoring for heart failure, potentially leading to earlier medical intervention, seems promising. The study was designed and executed by an outstanding research team, but had a fatal flaw of following the fallacy that “more data in the hands of clinicians is better.” After all the effort put into this study, the chosen intervention was to send a result to a clinician’s EHR in-basket queue.
A Common Fallacy
Companies developing inpatient, outpatient, and remote patient monitoring systems (and predictive models, clinical decision support, etc) often fall victim to this fallacy that simply placing more data in the hands of clinicians will improve clinical care. This has consistently proven false, and particularly so in time-constrained modern outpatient practice with clinicians stretched ever thinner and support staff shortages across the healthcare workforce. Clinicians who are inundated with data and alerts in an era with endless EHR inbox messages can’t be the linchpin in an RPM care delivery process. Rather, clinicians need these solutions to monitor patients and deliver the right care at the right time seamlessly, in a workflow that doesn’t necessitate their direct input.
FVC Health provides clients in our RPM portfolio a unique combination of front-line clinical knowledge along with engineering, healthcare operational, and business expertise to aid in the design, implementation, study, and successful scaling of solutions that are transforming healthcare delivery.