Embracing Remote Patient Monitoring Devices Among Healthcare Organisations

Posted on August 23, 2022

In June 2021, MSI International set out on a quest to gauge the popularity of RPM devices. It emerged that 8 in 10 survey respondents are all for remote patient monitoring solutions, with half of the group open to including it in their care plan. If these statistics are anything to go by, they clearly highlight what the preferences of modern patients are. For health organizations to avoid going against the grain and instead meet patients at their highest points of need, it’s important to include strategies for embracing remote patient monitoring devices and solutions at large.

What is Remote Patient Monitoring?

Remote patient monitoring has been around for a couple of years. It has now risen to be the talk of the town in light of recent pandemics. In its most basic term, remote patient monitoring is just exactly that. It is a method of off-site healthcare delivery that entails the tracking of important patient vitals from afar using electronic technology, which often connects physicians to this data remotely by cloud technology or other wireless alternatives.

Some of the vitals remote patient monitoring systems track include:

1. Heartbeats
2. Blood pressure
3. Glucose
4. Temperature levels and more

How Remote Patient Monitoring works?

Remote patient monitoring systems can vary significantly depending on the provider and the vitals or condition being tracked. But, generally, it involves the following steps:

1. Patients get fitted with a remote patient monitoring device that takes down the vital being recorded
2. Regardless of their location in the world, physicians receive reports and data in general regarding the patient’s condition as it changes
3. Due to this constant flow of information, physicians are able to adjust treatments in terms of switching prescriptions, and other solutions, as they see fit.

As physicians can access vital signs from virtually any point of care, with technologies such as our very own biosensor enabling the detection of events, they can also provide timely updates to patients, collaborative care teams, and program directors as well.

Remote Patient Monitoring Devices

Physicians recommend remote patient monitoring devices depending on what vitals they want to track exactly and that inevitably ties in with the condition being managed. Among the most common ones include:

1. Our very own Cardiac Rhythm wearable heart rate monitor: Our technology enables the remote monitoring of arrhythmias and other heart problems
2. Blood pressure cuffs: These help track blood pressure for conditions such as diabetes and hypertension
3. Glucometers: For patients with type 2 and type 1 diabetes, these are commonly used to get to the bottom of symptoms

Patients can also leverage a variety of other remote patient monitoring devices beyond this list, including pulse oximeters, Bluetooth thermometers, activity trackers and so much more.

Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring Devices

RPM devices and the services that accompany them present a slew of advantages, the most notable of which are:

1. Home based-care to provide quality treatment to patients with portable ECG machine for home use while they stay close to familiar surroundings and their families
2. Patients spend less time in waiting rooms that expose them to newer inflections. With RPM devices, physical checkups are reduced and that also means fewer disruptions to the patient’s life.
3. Practices can improve net patient revenue by unlocking revenue streams such as Medicare reimbursements. In fact, every RPM patient that the practice signs have the ability to bolster revenue by up to $207
4. Treatment compliance and health outcomes improve due to an increase in patient engagement levels. With round-the-clock data availability, physicians can detect deteriorating clinical events quickly to avert trouble.
5. With RPM devices, there comes the improved accessibility of healthcare as patients can get proper treatment and management for chronic and acute conditions regardless of time and distance

Reimbursement and Billing

RPM provides an additional channel of revenue for care facilities via Medicare reimbursements, and here’s how the RPM billing process works:

1. For initial program setup, covering patient enrolment, facilities can earn $21 via bill 99453
2. Afterward, you can bill 99454 to collect a base pay of $64 per month, which covers expenses for device reading and management.
3. Bill 99457 for 20 minutes of care management on top of the base monthly RPM charge.
4. You can then bill for an additional 20 minutes beyond that at $44, and a further 20 minutes (for a total of one hour) using the same bill i.e. 99457

All in all, this means your facility has the potential to bring in $207 for every RPM patient you tend to.

Choosing Remote Patient Monitoring Device Vendor

Health organizations have an abundance of RPM device vendors, which begs the question: how do they choose a great one with all the options in their faces? Well, here are a few pointers to show you the way:

1. User-friendliness: One of the most important factors to consider is the ease of use of the software solutions. Ultimately, you want Remote Patient Monitoring Technology that helps your facility hit the ground running with little downtime in terms of staff retraining. An RPM demo can clear these concerns
2. Client success: Your prospective RPM vendors have served and continue to tend to present clients. How has their success rate been thus further? This is a question best fielded to your supplier, and one whose answers also probably reside in a case study on your vendor’s website.
3. Credentials: A good vendor offers not just the technology but also has manual fail-safes in place. In our case here at Cardiac Rhythm, our cardiac monitoring technology is backed by CCI-CCT certified senior technicians to safeguard the accuracy of our RPM technology.

Setting up Your Remote Patient Monitoring Service

It’s time to act. But first, start by determining the exact RPM services you require, which could be cardiac monitoring, and blood glucose levels, you name it. You’ll need to then set your goals or what you want to achieve, which could be improving your patient engagement, healthcare outcomes, etc. Then ensure clinical and non-clinical staff have the working knowledge needed to get going. Once those are in place, your facility then needs quality and operational metrics which will put a finger on ROI, and also provide details on scaling opportunities. If you require remote patient monitoring services around cardiac care, trust us for leading heart health monitoring solutions that are easy to implement yet proven effective. Contact us today.

Tags: Remote Patient Monitoring Devices, Remote Patient Monitoring Services, RPM technology