Hospitals, Patient Engagement

Survey: Remote patient monitoring shifting from point solution to disease-specific, patient engagement

"Longterm, hospitals want patients to take a more participatory role and they see remote monitoring as having great potential to manage their health beyond the four walls of the hospital setting," Spyglass Consulting Group Managing Director Gregg Malkary said.

With a shift to fee-for-performance payment models on the horizon, healthcare facilities are getting more interested in evaluating and adopting remote patient monitoring platforms. They have a particular interest in its potential to help hospitals work with patients to better manage chronic conditions in the context of a population health strategy.

About 66 percent of healthcare organizations have deployed remote patient monitoring programs, according to a survey by Spyglass Consulting Group. That’s a substantial increase over 2013, when it first produced a report on this topic. It speaks to the interest by hospitals in developing a better understanding of their patients health between appointments and identifying deteriorating conditions earlier.

Spyglass interviewed 100 healthcare organizations for the survey, including multi-hospital delivery systems, standalone community hospitals, ambulatory environments, home health agencies, and government organizations.

More than 80 percent of the surveyed providers that had deployed remote monitoring had used mobile devices, primarily tablets, to support chronically ill patients recently discharged from the hospital. The breakdown was:

  • Congenital heart failure: 96 percent
  • COPD:                                 82 percent
  • Diabetes:                            71 percent
  • Hypertension:                  49 percent

In an interview, Spyglass Consulting Group Managing Director Gregg Malkary said: “A few organizations we have talked to have well-defined population health initiatives but many are struggling to define population health strategies. They are trying to figure our the right infrastructure.”

He added: “The technology still needs to evolve. Remote monitoring is becoming a larger element of patient engagement. Longterm, hospitals want patients to take a more participatory role and they see remote monitoring as having great potential to help manage their health beyond the four walls of the hospital setting.”

Other survey findings Malkary shared include:

  • Wearables have generated interest from hospitals and they have them on their radar, but there’s also a tremendous amount of hype and no one knows how many chronically ill patients are using them. Some have taken issue with the variability of the sensors behind most activity trackers and the challenge of identifying who is using the device. But hospitals want to see trend lines — that’s the most important rationale for using these devices.
  • Hospitals view remote monitoring as one of several data streams to support a larger analytics strategy.
  • Hospitals and health systems are providing remote monitoring devices (eg, tablets) to patients in trials small enough to manage them. They are incrementally increasing the size of these programs.
  • Hospitals’ use of remote patient monitoring is still in the early stages. The imperative is for organizations to get on the bandwagon and see what the opportunities are.

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