Remote Patient Monitoring: Definition of Emerging Use Cases to Improve Outcomes

After a year when the potential and need for virtual care was validated and thrown front and center, several well-defined use cases have emerged for remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring, where a patient’s biometrics such as blood pressure or oxygen saturation are measured outside of the hospital or clinic, is a critical component of virtual care.

Telehealth, another critical component of virtual care, peaked during the pandemic and is now settling at lower use levels.

Conversely, the need and use of remote patient monitoring is going to increase as new technologies are being developed at a rapid pace and patients are clamoring for access to and understanding of this data.

This is the first in a series of posts that introduce and discuss these well-defined use cases for remote monitoring:

1). Chronic conditions that have intermittent exacerbations for which remote monitoring could improve outcomes (asthma, heart failure)

2). Acute conditions that could be well-managed with biometric monitoring outside of the hospital or clinical (post-surgical medical decompensation, medication changes)

3). Chronic conditions for which patients are working on stepwise changes over time (obesity, stroke rehabilitation)

4). Treatment and monitoring of health in a pandemic. This includes both monitoring for the disease(s) of the pandemic and the treatment of pre-existing chronic conditions and newly emerging but unrelated acute conditions.

*This is the first in our series of articles on the Use Cases of RPM. Please take a look and join in the discussion around this emerging field. hashtag#RPM hashtag#Remotepatientmonitoring hashtag#virtualcare hashtag#homecareservices hashtag#homecareIn the next post we’ll discuss use case 1 in more detail.