Pivot Point Consulting IT services company recently released its Q2 2002 Healthcare IT Trends Report. The quarterly report includes six key insights regarding digital healthcare. The point in the report that aligns most closely with our focus makes a strong case that remote patient monitoring pays off.
In the section of the report subtitled, “Embrace Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)” the Pivot Point Consulting group emphasizes return on investment (ROI). It’s nice when numbers back up your point, and this report has supporting metrics in spades. According to the report, 40% of health centers currently use RPM. In that large subset of health centers that use RPM, 70% reported improved clinical outcomes including 76% fewer hospital readmissions. In addition, those health centers identified as using RPM had 51% fewer on-call urgent visits, 47% fewer physician visits, and 41% fewer patient care phone calls. The report numbers underscore RPM’s advantages. In this win/win/win best-case outcome, using RPM correlated with reduced service delivery costs, improved patient outcomes, and happier patients: this last item measured by expressed patient satisfaction and by patient retention.
Pivot Point Consulting’s report closes its section in the report on RPM by stating that the challenge to IT staff and CIOs is to build trust among clinical leadership of data from digital devices. The tasks involved in instilling that trust include device sourcing, inventory management and loss prevention, coding and other elements of reimbursement, and IT support needs. Healthcare organizations will also need workflow changes, particularly for patients with chronic conditions and for post-acute discharge management.
We have enjoyed watching the early development and implementation of RPM through its tentative early implementations up to its growing acceptance as a mainstream healthcare standard. If proof-of-concept metrics continue to support the ROI of RPM for all involved, we suspect that this is just the beginning.
