The reason is, healthcare institutions are heavily burdened, and the covid-19 pandemic has further increased their difficulties. They face a shortage in staff, equipment, devices, medicines, and even infrastructure to accommodate patients. Ultimately, patients are suffering across the globe, even in the wealthier nations. RPM seems to be a massive help in scenarios like these. It’s beneficial to both healthcare providers and patients. It helps reduce burdens on healthcare providers, allows easy accessibility of healthcare services, and saves patients from hassles. So, let’s understand more about RPM and find the best RPM providers.
What exactly is Remote Patient Monitoring?
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is the process of monitoring patients’ health outside a conventional healthcare setting. It can be done using mobile or other devices and digital technologies at a place with no access to medical care directly or physically, such as at home. The device monitors and captures medical data and transmits it to healthcare providers to enable them for assessment, diagnosis, and recommendation. Remote monitoring devices can be of various types to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate, weight, blood oxygen, and other vital signs. Based on the data collected from these devices, healthcare providers can suggest suitable treatment or ensure the current treatment plan is effective. RPM is different from telehealth. In fact, RPM falls under telehealth. It’s essential to understand their differences for billing and coding purposes. RPM uses devices to monitor patient health outside the healthcare provider’s infrastructure or organizational setting. On the other hand, telehealth uses telecommunication technologies and electronic data to provide clinical care from long distances. It also includes telephones, electronic mailing systems, machines, and remote patient monitors to provide overall care in addition to health-related education and health administration.
How does Remote Patient Monitoring work?
The step-by-step process of how remote patient monitoring (RPM) works is:
A healthcare provider assesses a patient’s condition and determines whether RPM would benefit the patient. If they find it useful, the provider prescribes an RPM program to monitor their vital signs remotely using RPM devices and provide care. Upon the patient’s consent, the healthcare provider launches RPM and assigns a device based on their condition to monitor and collect their health information like blood sugar levels, heart rate, and other vitals. Common RPM devices include blood pressure monitors, spirometers, weight machines, glucometers, and oximeters. The devices are set up away from the healthcare provider’s facility to monitor the patient’s vitals. The RPM devices are electronically connected via Bluetooth or cellular networking. They capture heath data and transmit it electronically to the provider for assessment. The healthcare provider analyzes the data received and provides suitable guidance, recommendations, or diagnosis.
Example
A covid-19 patient can be prescribed an oximeter to measure oxygen saturation in their blood. The device can be set up at home by following instructions properly to take the readings. Next, the obtained readings can be shared electronically with the healthcare provider. They will assess the results and guide the patient or family accordingly. So, it’s essential to choose the best remote patient monitoring company to avail optimum care.
What are the benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring?
RPM’s increased usage is due to its benefits to businesses and patients alike. It enables the healthcare providers to effectively monitor a patient’s health closely without physically visiting them. Similarly, the patients and their families can avail themselves of the best care at the comfort of their homes, avoiding hassles. So, if you are a healthcare provider, here are the top reasons for using RPM in your facility and avail many benefits.
Accurate and detailed health data
RPM devices provide accurate data in detail. It will help healthcare providers thoroughly understand the patient’s health conditions and symptoms and decide if the diagnosis is working. They can track their conditions over time to see the recovery status or if they need to change the course of action. As a result, patients can get superior care while being at home.
Contactless healthcare services
RPM allows healthcare providers to provide a contactless service to patients. It is beneficial for everyone – providers, patients, and others. It can limit the spread of infections, diseases, or a deadly virus like covid-19. By monitoring healthcare data away from the healthcare facility, patients can safeguard themselves from infections they might catch at the hospital. And if they are infected, they can save others who may come in their contact by avoiding going to the hospitals.
Better transparency
Patients and their families can view all the data from the RPM device, enabling transparency between them and the healthcare provider. It helps build trust, which everyone looks for before choosing a healthcare institution. This also benefits the healthcare providers as the patients will choose you over others. And the data also educates the patients so that they can adjust their lifestyles and make better health decisions.
Faster services and reduced hassles
RPM allows providers to offer faster healthcare services as opposed to the one where they had to treat all the patients at the hospital with staff shortage, especially in the events like the COVID pandemic. It also saves patients from regular visits, paying hefty fees, travel and accommodation costs, and hassles that come along with it. So, let’s discuss some of the best remote patient monitoring companies.
Withings
Monitor your patient health parameters with accurate patient-centric data using Withings. Its dashboard gives you all the information you want regarding patient health by monitoring their conditions. View the metrics in a single view and dig into all the relevant details to get a perfect view of long-term trends. Withings allows your team to manage patients easily by sharing their information within your team, setting up a plan, and coordinating with carer providers. Allow your patient to communicate their problems properly with secure in-app communication, save time for both parties, and resist unnecessary visits. You can also track your time spent on the platform monitoring the patients. Withings also offers highly durable, accurate, and easy to install products. In addition, DATA HUB technology has cellular networks to reach the patients without having a smartphone or Wi-Fi network. Withings is ahead of all as it uses real-time data, maintains privacy and security, provides a comprehensive dashboard, and never misses a measurement. Get devices like smart scales, hybrid watches, blood pressure monitors, sleep duration monitors, and more. Fill in your details and start with a demo to learn how Withings works.
MedM
Enable smooth connection between patients and doctors with MedM for proper diagnosis from the trackable information. It’s a helpful tool for people, healthcare service providers, developers, and device vendors. It collects data from 550+ IoT devices, wearables, and sensors and offers DeviceKit SDK, remote patient monitoring (RPM) system, personal care, and HomeHub. MedM is platform- and hosting-agnostic that you can deploy as a white-label solution quickly and easily. Its DeviceKit SDK supports iOS and Android, more than 550 devices, over 90 device vendors, and 16 types of measurements. It also comes fully documented, including sample code and SLA maintenance. MedM’s consumer mobile applications include top-notch personal health diary apps and support iOS and Android. Applications have hundreds of connecting sensors and come with offline mode requiring no registration and online mode for sharing and backups. Furthermore, you will get an RPM software platform that gives access to patient data and allows real-time view. It comes with thresholds, reports, reminders, trend graphs, and more. It comes with both options – hosted and cloud editions. In addition, it offers features like white labels, HIPAA compliant data storage, EHR/EMR integration APIs. MedM Hub Middleware is best for collecting and transmitting unattended data. It can collect data from four to eight devices simultaneously, is compatible with all the supported sensors, and is available under the RPM solution. Create your account to experience MedM’s usability and reliability in your day-to-day life and take a free trial.
Phillips
Treat your patient at the right time and place with Phillips’ Remote Patient Monitoring. It provides the care teams with the right tools to track the health of the patients at home, collaborate with them, and help detect problems by discussing with the right doctor before the final decision for admission. Patients will go through specific interventions and protocols, including measuring vital signs, watching educational videos, completing surveys, and participating in a video call with the virtual care team. The RPM process also helps reduce the cost and improve monitoring quality, access to care, each patient’s experience, and self-care, and help patients regain health stability. You can get benefits like:
Better outcomes at minimal costs Managing populations with tailored and scalable programs Prioritizing every patient according to their health needs through proper interventions Tracking vital signs, overall condition, and weights with the connected devices as well as applications
Moreover, risks like complex conditions, senior issues, chronic conditions, therapeutic care, personal care, COVID-19, behavioral health, and a lot more can be easily solved with the latest devices.
Medtronic
Let your patients engage in self-care at home with remote patient monitoring solutions by Medtronic. It lets you monitor patients easily using smartphones and helps patients with complications like respiratory illness, including COVID-19. It can track their reports through health checks, and Medtronic Care Management Services put all the effort into managing patients’ respiratory issues. It provides over 20 disease management programs, outreach services for patients, and support technology for clinical decisions. Make better clinical decisions with the care management services for early insights. The platform allows every patient to share their health information daily with a user-friendly interface. Senior citizens can also do their routine checkups remotely. Furthermore, you will get correct insights and analytics at the right time to help identify the issue so you can make a quick call for your patients to improve health outcomes.
ResMed
ResMed is one of the global leaders in remote patient monitoring. It has cellular connectivity into every CPAP device with over 15 million cloud devices and defines the connection between better health and technology. The platform can easily collect patient data to improve outcomes and reduce health care costs. It is growing daily from the results and feedback and allows you to integrate with other systems beyond ResMed’s network. ResMed offers sleep therapy, respiratory care, SaaS, and more with better support programs. It can solve the lack of interoperability between the systems, reduce duplication, inconsistent data, and keep data in sync. In addition, it is more flexible and secure with its improved workflows, cost-effective healthcare, better outcomes, and more. Save 50% of time and energy and use it in other fields. ResMed offers a complete view of patients between their care settings and empowers providers with the vitals so that a patient can get good care right from the beginning. You can also empower your patients to monitor themselves with myAir product.
Clear Arch Health
Clear Arch Health offers various healthcare services and products to help you achieve sustainable outcomes and guides at each step to enhance care and influence your engagement. Using their Lifestream Telehealth platform, you can get better insights and daily visibility into patients’ health. You get an intuitive dashboard to access all the metrics quickly using the LifeStream Clinical Monitoring Software RPM Dashboard. You can also track analytics using Lifestream Analytics and make it easy to deliver ROI. In addition, Lifestream Connect lets you integrate with EHRs and offers a unified view. You can easily connect with families and patients using their integrated video visits that come with a seamless interface. You can also enable the patients to communicate with you remotely and provide transparent results about their health. Additionally, you can schedule video-based visits and send and respond to messages using the mobile app.
eVisit
eVisit is on the mission of making healthcare delivery simple to enable the hospitals to provide the best care where and when required. This platform standardizes virtual care for healthcare systems by streamlining everything – scheduling, patient visit, intake, discharge, and managing waiting rooms. The tool can automate and enhance your patient workflows by offering you 150+ configurations and making your virtual care platform highly flexible. This adaptive, enterprise-grade platform works within robust firewalls and stringent security policies. Its videos are high definition and require no plugins. Don’t worry about patient privacy, regulations, and compliance; eVisit can take care of them for you so you can focus on delivering optimum care to your patients. It also keeps your patient information locked with eVault – their double-encrypted security database for patient data. eVisit can work with 50+ EMRs such as Epic, GE Healthcare, NextGen, etc., using HL7 integration to improve your workflow. You can also avail unlimited, superior customer care and technical support to solve your queries regarding virtual care technology.
iHealthUnifiedcare
Get an all-in-one solution iHelathunifiedcare to manage chronic diseases remotely. This user-friendly app enables on-demand lifestyle support, tailored healthcare plans for patients, and face-to-face or virtual interaction. Patients can even avail themselves of extended care at their homes, online services like alerts, messages, tasks, lifetime coaching, and medication compliance. It also increases patient engagement using real-time monitoring between office visits and routes escalated cases to the healthcare provider. This cloud-based intuitive clinical platform offers intelligent monitoring equipment and devices, provides real-time patient data analysis to take actionable insights, and enables medical outcome-driven care plans and treatment. iHealthunifiedcare provides clinically-proven programs such as blood glucose monitoring, CDE and RD services for diabetes, blood pressure monitoring, and MNT services for hypertension, and other services and monitoring devices for cardio-metabolic conditions.
QardioDirect
QardioDirect is a fully-integrated telehealth and RPM service that allows physicians to manage patients’ chronic care. It offers valuable features and benefits to help you improve patients’ conditions and work efficiently. Qardio has more than 3 million users with 97% of positive ratings. It connects patients using a remote wearable device while engaging them with an app and QardioMD RPM. You can easily prioritize your patients based on smart filtering or guidelines to quickly determine patients’ status and trends at your clinic, no matter where they are located. Qardio RPM services are cloud-based that you can access anytime, anywhere using any device or browser. Qardio will help you monitor and track the measurements and monitoring hours to provide better care and stay compliant. You don’t have to worry about compliance regulations; their cloud architecture is HIPAA compliant. Getting started with Qardio is also effortless, and you can integrate the tool with billing, EHRs, and other software systems within days. Qardio’s ROM systems can monitor a range of vitals remotely and are helpful for various chronic conditions across multiple domains of medicine, such as hypertension, weight management, obesity, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and post-surgical care. QardioDirect empowers healthcare providers to deliver value-based, remote, and continuous care. Its intuitive interface offers accurate, timely, comprehensive, and actionable information to help you make better decisions quickly. Qardio’s services and devices are compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, FDS, and CE. They offer devices such as:
QardioARM (blood pressure monitor) QardioBase2 (smart scale) QardioTemp (forehead thermometer) QardioSPO2 (pulse oximeter).
Conclusion
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is beneficial for healthcare providers and patients alike. It makes healthcare services faster and easily accessible, improves transparency, and saves cost, resources, and hassles. Thus, choose the best option amongst this list of top remote patient monitoring companies and avail these benefits. You may also be interested in smart health trackers.
