The New Wave of Remote Patient Monitoring Apps
In simplest terms, RPM centralizes and connects healthcare services, providers, and healthcare institutions with patients using well-integrated software. Medical IoT devices, such as smart scales, blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, blood pressure monitors, blood-glucose monitors, and bio-ingestible sensors, are used to implement RPM. And therefore, RPM is increasing as various medical IoT devices are gaining popularity.
But opportunities don’t come without challenges!
Similarly, managing and controlling such a digitally diverse healthcare system becomes challenging if you do not have a suitable digital solution, i.e., a Remote Patient Monitoring App.
Remote patient monitoring apps unlock a whole world of possibilities for healthcare providers. Using these solutions, you can easily monitor, track and record your patients’ data from a distance, understand health trends, develop personalized treatment plans, and much more.
Types Of Remote Patient Monitoring Apps
RPM is not new to the healthcare industry — you just didn’t know about it before Covid-19. All types of remote patient monitoring applications have one common goal: streamlining and improving the interaction between you and your patient.
The following are the most common types of remote patient monitoring apps:
1. Video Conferencing Apps
These applications came to life thanks to telemedicine app development, making real-time and direct patient-doctor interaction possible. Using these applications, you can examine your patient and start their treatment without requiring them to pay you a visit.
These apps have unique features like conferencing, e-prescriptions, queue management, electronic medical records, and e-billing — bringing your patients closer to efficient, informed, and improved healthcare.
2. IoT Medical Device App
IoT medical devices might sound heavy and complicated, but they aren’t. These applications collect patient data from specialized medical IoT devices, such as asthma monitors, glucometers, heart monitors, etc., and send it to healthcare providers.
In cases of emergency, IoT medical device apps are the first to generate alerts helping you prioritize who needs more help and when.
3. Questionnaire App
Chronic and mental illnesses have taken down a lot of the population. But ever since questionnaire apps gained a front, they have proved to be highly effective for tracking chronic and mental health illnesses. These applications keep track of patient’s state of health by having them fill out regular questionnaires.
What’s more? Building a health app like this doesn’t even require massive investments. They require minimal telemedicine app development efforts and are super easy to integrate into existing healthcare systems.
4. Precision Medicine Solutions
This one’s a little tricky, but this will become your next favorite if you’re a dedicated professional. Unlike earlier remote patient monitoring apps, precision medicine solutions neither connect doctors and patients nor focus on patient treatment.
Instead, they help healthcare leaders understand the current state of healthcare services. They focus on continuous research by anonymizing any target group’s healthcare data to improve overall healthcare service delivery quality.
How Does a Remote Patient Monitoring App Work?
Just like humans, despite being different, all RPM applications follow a common workflow because they serve a common purpose. So, in this section, we will breakdown the process of remote patient monitoring into four unique bits so you can understand how a typical RPM works:
1. Data Collection
The first step in RPM is to monitor and collect patients’ health-related data. It can be done using Bluetooth as well as the internet, but the main objective here is data collection.
To ensure this is done continuously, remote patient monitoring solutions are always integrated with RPM devices such as bio-ingestible sensors, medical IoT devices, and smart wearables.
2. Data Transmission
The next step is ensuring that the collected data is available to healthcare practitioners. There’s literally no point in data collection if it serves no benefit. Thus, the data collected from RPM devices is transmitted to healthcare professionals via phones, text, the internet, or other modes of communication.
3. Data Evaluation
The third and most crucial step is evaluating the patient’s data — which you’d know is a hectic task considering the tons of collected data.
Thus, the received data is fed into AI to formulate results quickly to make matters easy. This way, you can make sense of the received data and develop customized treatment plans for your patients.
4. Emergency Notifications
This feature is more or less the reason behind the rapid evolution of RPM. During Covid-19, as you might remember, people needed immediate help, and healthcare faced a major deficit.
RPM marked its foot when it helped doctors help the ones requiring immediate care using emergency notifications. Using this feature, an RPM app alerts emergency responders so they can reach out and provide the care and attention needed.
Key Components of Remote Patient Monitoring App
By now, you must be impressed by RPM makes healthcare easy, efficient, and readily available. So, if you are looking for telemedicine app development solutions, some things will help you make an informed decision.
Remote patient monitoring solutions are IoT systems and are based on the following four components in general:
1. Integration With Patient Monitoring Devices
If you have reached this point, you are probably well aware of the role of RPM devices in remote patient monitoring. As a healthcare provider, you need the patient’s data transmitted to you in real-time so that you can help that person.
And that is the first component of RPM apps, i.e., they leverage the device’s sensors to bring telehealth into action.
2. Patient-Side Interface
Since we’re building a health app, by rule, there must be a patient-side interface so that the patients have constant access to it. The patient-side interface ensures patient healthcare data collection using Bluetooth. Patients can also provide healthcare information through a questionnaire app or other communication tools.
3. Cloud RPM Server
This component plays a substantial role in data collection, storage, and exchange. You must be wondering why this data can’t be stored locally? Well, it can, but cloud RPM servers are preferred because they are secure.
Using efficient admin panels, they limit data access to reduce the risk of data theft. Additionally, they are easily accessible and more scalable — for you as well as your patients.
4. Doctor-Side Interface
This is where you come, the doctor-side interface. To have access to your patient’s data, this is a must-have. This interface always allows more functionality than the patient-side interface. It features all the decision-making tools, reports modules, analytics modules, notifications, and emergency alerts.
Benefits Of Remote Patient Monitoring App
We know that remote patient monitoring apps offer substantial benefits to healthcare providers as well as patients. It has done wonders, from increasing the net patient revenue to reducing healthcare expenses.
Let us look at some of the benefits of RPM to see how it has metamorphosed and revolutionized the healthcare industry for good:
1. Improved Chronic Care Management
Chronic conditions, the leading cause of disability and death, can be managed more effectively through real-time patient tracking. RPM devices keep the patients engaged, continuously monitor them, and share real-time data with their doctors.
It has also improved self-management among patients. And that’s not all; you can monitor the performance of your prescribed treatment and even see if your patient is following your prescription.
2. Data-Driven Medical Decision-Making
RPM helps see the real-time changes in a patient’s health state so that you can intervene and provide proactive care.
Simply put, with RPM, you can see how patients’ symptoms change over time, identify if a trend exists and make much more informed decisions for their health.
3. Reduced Healthcare Expenses
One of the most significant benefits of RPM is reducing avoidable healthcare expenses. RPM ended the need for unnecessary hospital admissions, ED utilization, and readmissions.
It has not only lowered the cost of care but has also reduced the stay periods. Since it enables acute and chronic care at home, it also reduces the administrative burden — enabling you to provide easy and improved care.
4. Optimized Medical Staff Efficiency
With RPM, you can prioritize who needs immediate attention while keeping an eye on your overall patient population. Doctors worldwide are now providing RPM-enabled care, e-prescription, and education to their patients to reduce the number of clinic visits.
5. Improved Access to Healthcare
Remote patient monitoring apps ensure your patients can contact you anytime, anywhere, especially in cases of emergency. RPM reached the underserved and rural areas where people would otherwise be unable to access healthcare providers.
Final Thoughts
The factors that ensured RPM’s success include the constraints of the pandemic, including rapid virus transmission, shortage of care facilities, & social distancing, and regulatory demand to expand healthcare access.
RPM has completely revolutionized the healthcare industry, and for good reasons. It bridged the barrier of access between you and those needing your help. It improved the care delivery service while perfecting healthcare expenses to become an important part of advanced healthcare.
