Remote Patient Monitoring and Small Practices

We’ve started to see the proliferation of wireless health devices that can track a wide variety of health data and more of these devices are becoming common place in the home. Here’s a great tweet that contains an image of some of the popular devices:

While many of these devices are being purchased by the patients and used in the home, there are a number of other programs where healthcare organizations (usually hospitals) are purchasing the devices for the patients who then use the device at home. These programs are designed for hospitals to remotely monitor a patient and identify potential health issues early in order to avoid a hospital readmission.

For those who work in hospitals, you know how important (financially and otherwise) it is for hospitals to reduce their readmissions. While this is great for hospitals, how does this apply to small practices and general and family practice doctors in particular. There’s no extra payment for a small practice doctor to help reduce the readmission of their patient to the hospital. At least I haven’t seen a hospital pay a doctor for their help in this service yet.

What then would motivate a small practice doctor to leverage these types of remote patient monitoring tools?

Sadly, I don’t think there is much motivation for the standard small practice office to use them. It’s easy to see where a concierge doctor might be interested in these technologies. As a concierge doctor or direct primary care doctor, it’s in their best interest to keep their patient population as healthy as possible. As this form of care becomes more popular, I think these types of technology will become incredibly important to their business model.

The other trend in play is the shift to value based reimbursement and ACOs. Will these types of remote patient monitoring technologies become important in this new reimbursement world? I think the jury is still out on this one, but you could see how they could work together.

I’ve recently had a number of doctors hammering me on Twitter and in the comments of blog posts about how technology is not the solution to the problems and that technology is just getting in the way of the personal face to face connection that doctors have been able to make in the office visit of the past. Their concern is real and those implementing the technology need to take this into account. The technology can get in the way if it’s implemented poorly.

However, these people who smack the technology down are usually speaking from a very narrow perspective. EHR and other technology can and does disrupt many office visits. We all know the common refrain that the doctor was looking at the computer not at me. This is a challenge that can be addressed.

While the above is true, how impersonal is a rushed 10-15 minute office visit with a doctor? How impersonal is it for the doctor to prescribe a medication to you and never know if you actually filed it? How impersonal is it for a doctor to prescribed a treatment and never follow up with you to know if the treatment worked? How impersonal is it for the doctor to never talk or interact with you and your health unless you proactively go to that doctor because you’re sick?

Technology is going to be the way that we bridge that gap and these remote patient monitoring technologies are one piece of that puzzle. I believe these technologies and others make healthcare so much more personal than it is today. It changes a short office visit to treat a chief complaint into actually caring for the patient.

This is what most doctors I know would rather be doing anyway. They don’t want to churn patients anymore than the patient wants to be churned, but that’s how they get paid. Hopefully the tide is changing and we’ll see more and more focus on paying providers for using technology that provides this type of personal care.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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