Delivering insights on care outcomes – and not just more data noise
As the virtual care landscape continues to grow and shift, many questions surrounding the future of remote patient monitoring (RPM) are emerging. Issues ranging from accessibility, to devices, infrastructure, and more are all facets of the remote care model that should be thoroughly explored. Providers who use these platforms will need to have a thorough grasp on the unique issues surrounding this type of care going forward in this competitive marketplace.
The usage of the data collected through remote monitoring will be an important factor in creating value for both patients and providers. In this Hot Take, Senior Analyst Alex Lennox-Miller explores the possibilities of what these data sets could mean for everyone involved in remote care – and how to unite the efforts of providers, care managers, and patients themselves by utilizing effective data collection and distribution.
Chilmark’s upcoming Market Trends Report on Virtual Care will explore these issues and more in greater depth; you can sign up here if you’d like to be added to our mailing list to receive updates on the research.
Transcript of the video below:
Alex Lennox-Miller: What platforms need to focus on is providing analytics and recommendations, turning that data from something that’s just descriptive into something that’s genuinely recommending useful actions.
Welcome to the Chilmark Research Channel. I’m Alex Miller, I’m a senior analyst here at Chilmark Research. And today, we’re going to be talking about remote patient monitoring. Before we get started, don’t forget to like this video. Leave a comment for us if you’d like to get some feedback. Make sure to subscribe to our channel. And don’t forget to hit that notification bell.
With renewed focus and interest in virtual care, remote patient monitoring has become a major topic in health care, enabling both home care for chronic care patients and upcoming hospital at home and treatment at home models. There’s a lot of focus on what remote patient monitoring is on the question of accessibility, on access to devices and to infrastructure. Those are vital topics that need to be explored.
But more importantly, we think, is what a platform does with the data that it collects from those devices. If a platform is simply collecting A1C data from a glucometer, collecting steps from somebody’s smartwatch and dumping that data into a data lake or an EHR, that’s better than nothing. But it isn’t really providing the most possible value, either to providers or to patients.
Instead, what platforms need to focus on is providing analytics and recommendations, turning that data from something that’s just descriptive into something that’s genuinely recommending useful actions. Those can be directed to providers, to care managers and care teams, or even back to the patients themselves. A lot of patients would love to know how they’re doing with their chronic condition; to get feedback and updates, not just in the long term, whenever they have an appointment, but day to day. Feedback about how their activity and how their meals impact their condition and how they feel; feedback about not just what their results are, but what they mean.
Are they good or bad? How have they been trending? That’s immensely valuable information to any patient. And it’s information that’s pretty easy to provide because you’re collecting it already. When it comes to providers and care teams providing insight not just into the current state, but trends, alerting them before a patient moves out of control state into something more serious. Alerting them when they can be contacted and intervened with is invaluable, not just to the health of the patient, but to the workflow of the care team and the provider and to the finances of the health system. Because once patients move from that moderate into a high risk category, the costs associated with them go up also.
Ultimately, the goal is to keep patients at home, in control, and healthy, and being able to monitor them is an essential component of that. But the monitoring has to come with data and it has to come with meaning. You have to be able to communicate. So if your platform is collecting that remote monitoring data, that’s fantastic. Keep doing it. But look at what else you can do with that data to provide additional value to providers, to patients and to care teams.
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