If you’re a healthcare provider looking to get started with telehealth, you will ideally want a remote patient monitoring (RPM) platform with features that can best suit your patient population. However, understanding each and how they relate to patient care can be challenging, given the wide range of RPM platforms and their available features.
In this article, we offer a quick rundown of the various features that a remote patient monitoring platform can have and the benefits that these features provide to both patients and healthcare providers.
Remote Patient Monitoring Features & Overview
While individually distinct, the key features of an RPM platform allow healthcare providers to:
- Increase patient engagement
- Improve patient education
- Reduce nursing/staffing burdens
- Improve patient satisfaction
While each feature addresses a particular aspect of remote patient monitoring, they all share the same primary goals—to reduce patient readmission rates and improve patient outcomes.
Bluetooth Biometric Monitoring
Bluetooth biometric monitoring enables healthcare providers to monitor a patient’s acute or chronic conditions from outside a healthcare facility. These monitoring devices enable real-time tracking and analysis of a patient’s condition, allowing providers to make proactive clinical decisions that can improve patient outcomes.
Blood pressure cuffs, glucometers, pulse oximeters, and other measurement devices are examples of Bluetooth biometric monitoring devices. Our Bluetooth monitoring devices at HRS have 4G connectivity, which eliminates the need for Wi-Fi.
Video Visits
Virtual or video visits enable healthcare providers to increase patient touchpoints, improve healthcare access (by eliminating travel burdens for in-office visits), and improve patient engagement and satisfaction.
Furthermore, the immediacy of video visits can be life-saving. It allows providers to connect with a patient as soon as they detect abnormal biometric readings from their patients, allowing them to better assess and prevent the situation from escalating further.
If you’re considering offering video visits, you should ensure that the RPM platform is HIPAA-compliant and uses a video platform designed specifically for healthcare (PHI protection measures, HIPAA security standard encryption, etc.).
Risk Alerts
Risk alerts notify providers of potential health or compliance risks a patient may face. This can include changes in biometric data, symptom surveys, activity, or medication adherence.
Risk alerts can assist in guiding the actions and interventions of supervising clinicians, informing the patient of appropriate measures, and reinforcing self-management, resulting in better patient outcomes and a lower chance of re-hospitalization.
Medication Reminders
From digital pillboxes, access to reconciled medication lists, and mobile reminder apps, medication reminders can all help to improve patient outcomes by improving medication compliance and reinforcing positive behavior changes.
Symptom Surveys
Clinicians can use symptom surveys to check in on their patients daily and identify adverse outcomes through survey results. Patients can use symptom surveys to better engage with their health and recovery, leading to better patient self-management and health outcomes.
Teach Back Quizzes
Teach-back quizzes, available through the telehealth platform, can effectively close the loop in assessing and ensuring a patient’s understanding of post-discharge instructions. Nurses can also conduct a virtual home visit with the patient to ensure they have completed the teach-back quiz and understand their discharge plans.
Educational Videos
Patient education is critical to ensuring that patients fully understand their condition and the steps they must take to recover completely or improve their day-to-day quality of life. RPM platforms can aid patient education by providing an extensive library of educational materials regarding a patient’s condition and how to best manage it.
Wound Imaging
Wound care imaging enables clinicians to assess a patient’s wound from outside a healthcare facility, where collaboration with a wound care specialist can assist patients, caregivers, and clinicians in better understanding any changes in patient care and preventing hospitalizations.
RPM platforms with wound care imaging can improve communication between providers and physicians while reducing clinician workload by allowing wound care specialists to evaluate more patients in a virtual setting.
Calls
Calls can help improve medication adherence (via automated call reminders), provide clinicians with insights into patients’ conditions (via symptom surveys), increase patient engagement, and promote patient independence.
While an RPM platform with a call feature may overlap with virtual/video visits, calls require far less setup than virtual visits, making them a more convenient option.
Texting
Text messaging can be a highly beneficial component of your RPM program, aiding in care plan compliance, patient engagement, and improving the patient-provider relationship. Like the call feature, texts can be automated to remind patients about upcoming visits or their medication
Patient Triage
A best-in-class RPM platform is able to give providers immediate information on their patient’s risk factors and triage them accordingly.
For example, the Alert Dashboard in HRS’ ClinicianConnect can allow providers to quickly triage their patient population based on risk factors such as symptoms, biometrics, non-adherence, and more.
Choose HRS For Patient-Centric RPM Solutions
HRS’s advanced remote patient monitoring platform can provide all the features listed above, making us an excellent partner for RPM solutions in your facility.
HRS is here to help you implement RPM solutions effectively—reducing admissions, improving patient care, and saving on operating expenses with services ranging from monitoring devices and platforms to installation and training. Get in touch with us today! 