By Brian Carter, SVP, Product, Validic™
In part one of this blog post, we discussed the myriad of challenges with launching and scaling a remote patient monitoring program. With all of those perceived barriers, it can seem daunting to plan, execute, and scale a remote monitoring program. So how do you overcome these objections, obstacles, and challenges? Three key strategies will go a long way towards ensuring your program’s success and longevity:
- Obtain and manage the most relevant, useful data
- Apply intelligence and insights to the data (manage by exception)
- Provide seamless, integrated workflows where and when needed
One of the most critical components of a remote monitoring program is, of course, ensuring you are able to easily obtain and manage the most relevant, useful data generated by your patients. This involves not only ensuring you have an adequate ecosystem of devices and apps that you can support, but also an efficient way to manage that ecosystem. You also need to ensure you have the right tools in place to help your care teams and patients easily connect these apps and devices to your enterprise. The use of a utility platform can help eliminate this frequently referenced barrier by enabling an organization to easily tap into a broad ecosystem of data sources, to not have to worry about keeping up with API changes from device manufacturers, and to access tools that simplify the process of connecting and disconnecting devices.
In the first part of this blog series, we talked about another big challenge: what to do with the data once it is accessible. If your RPM program is successful, your organization has the potential to be receiving hundreds of thousands of data points per day from your patient population. Simply capturing the data may be sufficient for some use cases, such as enabling a provider to review a patient’s home blood pressure values during a visit. But, most use cases require a system to monitor data points as they enter the system – with the ability to raise the most concerning values to the attention of the patient and/or care provider. Most electronic health records are not equipped to provide this kind of high-volume monitoring and alerting; therefore, you should expect the need for a data analytic l
ayer that can run on top of your data connectivity platform to do this monitoring and alerting. By employing systems that can do this next-level monitoring, your care team can now manage by exception, meaning they are spending less time “checking in” on everyone [and entering biometric readings into the EHR] and more time “caring for” the people that need it.
Once you have a system that can capture the most relevant, useful information from your population and perform the necessary analytics to determine who is self-managing, who is trending towards an issue, and who is checked out of the program completely, it is time to figure out how to get this information seamlessly to the all of the people who need access to it. It’s easy to find stand-alone systems that provide this insight, but feedback from countless care professionals tell us that if the solution exists outside their workflow, requires opening a separate browser or application, or necessitates remembering another password, it’s not a tool they’re going to use. Finding a system that can easily integrate visualizations, observations, and notifications into the care team’s existing workflow is critical. The same goes for patients; meeting them where they live (on their phone with text messages, emails, or apps they’re already using) is going to go a long way to ensuring they engage with the program and get value out of it.
In summary, a successful RPM program will ensure that you’re getting the right data from the right people, making sense of that data to make the right interpretation, and bringing it to the attention of the right care team to take the right action. If you have faced challenges in doing this, or are just starting out on your RPM journey, drop us a note. We’d love to share more with you, as well as look at how Validic might be able to help your organization create a scalable, sustainable RPM strategy. Our new remote patient monitoring platform, Impact, is designed with all of these principles in mind and is designed to extend your existing investment in your EHR and care management solutions. Learn more about Validic Impact here.
This blog is the second in a two-part blog series. Read the first part of this series here.