Can Remote Work Lead to Better Healthcare?
With the nation’s economy and rising prices at the forefront of the public’s mind, it is important to consider how high and rising healthcare costs may begin posing an even greater burden for workers, their families, and employers who fund a large share of that coverage.
The United States currently spends more on health care than any other country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates that national health spending grew 4.2% in 2021, reaching a mindboggling sum of $4.3 trillion.
U.S. healthcare spending is also rising more rapidly than the economy. While health-care spending made up 5% of total U.S. GDP in 1960, in 2020, spending reached almost 20% of total U.S. GDP. Cynthia Cox, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, explains, “Health care almost always outpaces inflation, and so health-care costs grow faster than the economy. That’s why it’s representing a larger and larger share of the economy.”
Despite the nation’s high healthcare expenditure, surveys find that Americans are reporting access to affordable healthcare as the greatest barrier to wellbeing.
Before the pandemic, most providers tabled digital investments meant to improve the way patients and clinicians engage with the health system and each other, prioritizing other needs instead. When the pandemic hit, the crisis exposed just how vulnerable healthcare organizations were without them. Now, patients and clinicians expect useful digital tools as part of the care journey.
With these recent advances in digital health, we must ask ourselves how we can leverage technology to make the biggest economic impact and help Americans access affordable care.
As of right now, wearables and artificial intelligence look set to reshape healthcare in three big ways: remote monitoring, early diagnosis, and personalized treatment.
What is Remote Patient Monitoring?
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a method of healthcare delivery that utilizes the latest advances in information technology to passively gather patient data outside of a traditional healthcare setting. When RPM devices electronically transmit the data to healthcare providers, it gives providers the ability to analyze and track real-time changes in a patient’s health.
RPM utilizes at-home measurement devices, wearable sensors, symptom trackers, and patient portals. This real-time understanding of a patient’s health state allows providers to make quick, proactive clinical decisions that improve health outcomes and thus provide better care.
With the shifting landscape of work-life around the world, the at-home component of RPM is becoming increasingly relevant. According to Nick Bloom, a Stanford University economist, roughly 25% to 35% of workers are now working from home. A recent survey found the average U.S. employee values two to three days of remote work each week as much as a 6% pay hike— and many would seek a new job if required to come back to the office permanently. Office occupancy rates confirm this shift. While office occupancy rates were running at 99% before the pandemic, now rates range from 30% to 50% across several major U.S. cities.
This massive cultural shift to remote work has implications beyond the economy and the labor market though: it can provide an avenue for Americans to access proactive, affordable healthcare. In our previous article on Connected Health, we discussed how the rapid uptick in smart home technology can improve healthcare delivery by aggregating health data from multiple smart home devices, applying AI and machine learning algorithms to decipher health patterns from the data, and accurately sharing pertinent patient health status information to caretakers and providers in a timely manner. With so many Americans now opting to work from home, smart home devices with RPM technologies could offer a cheaper, proactive (even predictive) healthcare model, unlike the one we currently have.
Early Diagnosis
A large part of RPM’s success is thanks to the sensors and algorithms that combine to help advanced wearable devices measure heart rate, activity, oxygen levels, and more. In medicine, diagnoses often depend on biomarkers — specific molecules in blood or other body fluids linked to a particular health condition. High blood-sugar concentration, for example, is a biomarker for diabetes.
Some of the measurements wearable devices take are like digital equivalents of established biomarkers and diagnostic tests (e.g. hydration). Others, however, are novel metrics that can predict or diagnose an illness, such as sneezing or coughing patterns. Collectively, these are called “digital biomarkers”. Tracking these digital biomarkers allows wearables to identify changes that are early signs of illness or age-related deterioration and prevent poor health down the road.
The savings come from the fact that wearables can detect subtle changes that otherwise go unnoticed, leading to less severe disease and cheaper treatment. Sensors will reveal if an older person’s balance is starting to weaken. Somatix’s SafeBeingᵀᴹ smartband, for example, notifies a patient and their caregiver (if they have one) when the person wearing the band is at an increased risk of falling. To prevent falls and broken limbs, the SafeBeingᵀᴹ platform sends a notification to perform strength and balance exercises as a preventative measure. The average cost of a fall injury is over $30,000, so just imagine how much the healthcare expenditure would decrease if we were able to prevent even half the 36 million annual falls that happen in the U.S. alone.
Revolutionize Treatment
While in one person, regularly eating bananas moderates blood sugar, in another, it raises blood sugar to levels that can over time cause harm. When doctors can see a patient’s body in real-time all the time, they can provide better care. Since machine learning can filter a torrent of data to reveal a continuous, quantified picture of you and your health, doctors can see how each person is uniquely responding to a treatment plan or medication. Wearables can make this a reality since they give doctors the real-time ability to see how your body is reacting. As a result, doctors can create more effective regimes that are better than the one-size-fits-all approach we currently have.
Moreover, wearables can transform how we treat chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Did you know some 80% of chronic disease is preventable through lifestyle changes? Continuous measurement makes it possible to establish what patterns are normal for an individual based on vital measures like heart rate or respiration. This, in turn, can help users and their doctors recognize important deviations in lifestyle earlier, before a disease develops. While implementing these technologies might cost money in the short term, there is a high likelihood that they will pay off in the long run.
