How remote patient monitoring can improve health
Todd Bellemare, senior vice president of strategic solutions at Definitive Healthcare, said RPM will help providers read patients more quickly, especially those with chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. He adds that RPM also helps providers understand behavioral barriers that can interfere with medication adherence and daily measurements such as blood sugar levels.
“Patients can avoid some costly patient interventions, such as going to the emergency department,” says Bellemare.
In recent research According to the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, the use of RPM devices resulted in a 65% reduction in hospital admissions and a 44% reduction in emergency department visits in COPD patients.
“We’ve been talking about prevention and maintenance for 20 years, not just ultimately treating the symptoms of the disease,” says Bellemare. “RPM gives us the opportunity to put into practice all the conversations we’ve had over the last 20 years about maintenance and prevention.”
expedition: How to integrate remote patient monitoring data to improve health outcomes.
Nurses respond to deployment of remote patient monitoring
Bandwidth for nurses is shrinking year by year, and many are feeling overwhelmed by the stress of the pandemic, Bellemare said.
“Patient face-to-face time is a big part of what a patient is doing and why they are in the profession in the first place,” says Bellemare. “Once you start adding all these collateral administrative burdens, it becomes almost unbearable.”
Some nurses view the addition of more technology as additional administrative work and a threat to their role. 2021 National Nurses Federation and California Nurses Association issued a joint statement Kaiser Permanente’s “home care” initiative will undermine the role of nurses in care.
and 2020 Journal of Internet Research Report, half of the nurses surveyed reported that they were distressed by the RPM increasing workload. Still, all nurses said RPM improved patient safety.
“If hospitals and health systems could find ways to reduce the administrative and technical burden on nurses, the nurses’ workplace would do much better,” says Bellemare.
