Our CEO, Aileen Lai, kickstarted the year by unveiling the latest trends in how Remote Patient Monitoring can drive chronic disease management, improve patient adherence, and optimize healthcare costs during an interview with Asian Hospital and Healthcare Management.
Here, she shares her insights as she delves into the strategies, challenges, and future trends shaping remote patient monitoring.
Here, she shares her insights as she delves into the strategies, challenges, and future trends shaping remote patient monitoring.
1. What are the key technological advancements driving the adoption of remote patient monitoring, and how can healthcare providers effectively integrate them into existing systems without disrupting care continuity?
I will broadly categorize technological advancements to the 3 key valuable aspects of RPM: Driving adoption and adherence – Covid-19 pandemic had the entire world turned their eyes on healthcare and since, billions of dollars has gone toward the investment of medical devices. Current traditional medical device still requires user intervention but the latest devices involves wearable (watches, patches, and clothing) and contactless devices (PPG, mattresses and home installations).
Driving efficacy and efficiency – Devices are more valuable when we make sense of the data generated. In addition to the presentation of collected data to users (clinicians and patients) for proactive management, a number of RPM software and platforms supports triaging of patients for workload management, automation of part of care management and most importantly, supports the clinical and administrative workflows specific to RPM.
Driving cost – Smarter technologies (software and devices) are able to provide initial automated indications of results customized to individual patients’ need such as their diseases, age, weight and co-morbidity. Some technologies attempted to support clinicians in their decision making. The most successful technologies support the collection and analysis of data in proving improvements to health outcomes, supports avoidable hospital admissions or readmission and emergency presentations and thereby, reduces overall cost.
2. With the growing adoption of remote patient monitoring, how can organizations ensure robust data privacy and compliance with regional regulations, particularly in cross-border data exchanges?
As trust is of utmost importance in healthcare, data privacy and compliance with state, federal and regional regulations is crucial. It is complex and sometimes confusing with significant focus and investment required to ensure compliance. The first steps to any product is privacy and security by design at every level. Building a strong foundation at onset surpasses heavy investments and high risks of non-compliance at a later stage.
3. What are the primary challenges in scaling remote patient monitoring platforms for diverse healthcare systems across multiple geographies?
Healthcare is a highly personalized service to start with, leading to disparities and seemingly challenging to having one product fits all. This is not to mention diversity in languages, culture, sex, religion and other factors. This contributed fundamentally to widespread challenge in health equity.
4. How can remote patient monitoring be leveraged to bridge gaps in healthcare accessibility and equity for underserved populations?
There are a number of underserved populations who faces varied challenges and thus, require different RPM solutions that addresses their specific challenges. For example, one of the most common underserved populations are those residing in rural or remote areas. In addition to social economic status, culture and language amongst others, the sheer distance and lack of infrastructure rendered options in serving them limited.
When deployed properly, RPM is proven to prove first line of support for patients without the need to drive hours to see the nearest doctor. For example, patients are fully capable of taking their own vitals measurements customized to their individual healthcare need and have these data reviewed by their care team remotely. A tele-consultation or phone call can then follow. A significant number of studies had shown to prove avoidance of hospital admissions or readmissions, emergency department visits and most importantly, improve overall health outcomes.
5. What strategies can ensure seamless interoperability between remote patient monitoring devices and various electronic health record (EHR) systems?
Healthcare is fortunate to have long standing global standards when it comes to interoperability. For example, Health Level Seven (HL7) supports common data standards and messaging languages to support interoperability. It is although hardly RPM devices are integrated directly with EHR systems, the RPM platform that connects the devices will be fully capable of integrating with EHR systems.
6. What innovative approaches can enhance patient engagement and adherence in remote monitoring programs, especially for chronic disease management?
Simplicity. There are many factors but simplicity is key. For chronic patients, the persona is generally of higher age group, less technologically savvy, requires accessibility when using a smartphone and is under medication. Innovations happens at every point including IoT devices that offers seamless connectivity to mobile application that offers one-touch measurement.
For the clinicians, the focus is workload management. Difficult-to-use products makes every step an effort and is time consuming.
7. How do you measure the clinical and operational outcomes of implementing remote patient monitoring, and what metrics are critical for assessing its success?
With a clear understanding of the success factors, we focus on setting its corresponding metrics surrounding adoption, adherence and most importantly, health outcomes. A data-driven approach, both quantitative and qualitative, establishes both baseline and target objectives for both clinical and operational outcomes. We collect a significant amount of data using different approaches and from various sources including other systems to support multiple metrics with the critical ones including adoption and adherence rates, alerts and threshold improvements, hospital admissions and readmissions avoidance and patients’ improvements to quality of life.
8. Can you discuss the economic implications of remote patient monitoring in terms of cost reduction for healthcare providers and patients?
Every government spend a significant amount of budgets in healthcare with the US spending USD4.9 trillion and reaching 17.6% of GDP. With the aging population, increase in lift span and sedentary lifestyle, healthcare spend is growing every year.
RPM, specifically, focus on avoidable hospital admissions/ readmissions and emergency presentation and presents great potential in proactive health management to avoid deterioriation into acute conditions, thereby directly reduces significant hospitalization costs. A proactive health management approach also increase patient’s control over their health which also results in long term health independence, giving back years of meaningful lives to them.
9. How do you balance the need for customizable remote monitoring solutions for individual patient needs with the benefits of standardized platforms?
Healthcare is a highly personalized service to start with, leading to disparities and seemingly challenging to having one product fits all. This is not to mention diversity in languages, culture, sex, religion and other factors. This meant compromising patients’ need is not an option and thus, a good product or platform will be required to customize to individual patient need to fundamentally serve its purpose.
10. What role does artificial intelligence and predictive analytics play in remote patient monitoring, and how do these technologies improve decision-making?
RPM collects a large amount of longitudinal data which can present its challenges when it comes understanding the data. This is where more advanced technologies such as AI or predictive analytics comes in. Regardless of the tools use, the data can be leveraged to support better trending detections, reduction of workload through smart triaging and most importantly, can be a health companion to our patients.
11. What are the key regulatory barriers to the global adoption of remote patient monitoring, and how can stakeholders navigate these challenges?
RPM platforms are currently not subjected to major regulatory requirements unless it serves as a Software-as-a-Medical Device (SaMD). The key regulatory barriers mainly surround privacy and security. The global adoption of RPM, amongst many other factors, has been around reimbursements, both the stringent criteria and simply the lack of it.
12. How can remote patient monitoring systems be designed to integrate seamlessly with preventive care initiatives to reduce long-term healthcare costs?
Preventive care programmes are usually structured within a certain funding model and set objectives and its corresponding success metrics. RPM solutions are required to be adaptive and flexible enough to support the fulfillment of these objectives and metrics.
13. What emerging trends in remote patient monitoring do you foresee having the most significant impact on the healthcare industry in the next five years?
Aging-in-place and longevity. The adoption of RPM by healthcare organization addresses the immediate and current resource crunch and escalating cost. In the mid-term to long-term, the trend is for patients to stay at home at long as possible, including seeking healthcare services. Providing an avenue to live a meaningful live at the comfort of one’s own home, many societies will be able to move towards the path of longevity for their people.
14. How can healthcare organizations address ethical concerns, such as potential over-reliance on technology or the digital divide, in the deployment of remote patient monitoring solutions?
There had been a large amount of meaningful works in the improvement of health equity, part of it is the digital divide. There had been more additional fundings to support such initiatives. As a committed advocate of health equity, the first thing is to build a product with health equity in mind from affordability, flexibility, cultural and language sensitive to even making things work without internet.
For the healthcare organizations and at our current infancy stage in adoption, healthcare organizations can leverage RPM platforms to reach out to underserved communities and provide localized and cost effective solutions as compared to traditional healthcare services.
About Aileen Lai, CEO & Founder HealthBeats®
A global executive, Aileen Lai spent most part of her career in Healthcare and Life Science in bring technology and innovation towards improving care. Her vast experience, extensive domain knowledge and deep understanding of challenges in healthcare industry contributed to the founding of HealthBeats®, a global remote vitals monitoring platform. Aileen holds the position of Vice-Chair, Digital Health, Start-ups & SMEs Committee of Asia Pacific Medical Technology Association (APACMed). She lectures and holds the position of course chair for Biomedical Informatics at Bachelor level with Singapore University of Social Sciences.
To read more, please click here.
To read about Aileen Lai's LinkedIn post, please click here.
About Aileen Lai, CEO & Founder HealthBeats®
A global executive, Aileen Lai spent most part of her career in Healthcare and Life Science in bring technology and innovation towards improving care. Her vast experience, extensive domain knowledge and deep understanding of challenges in healthcare industry contributed to the founding of HealthBeats®, a global remote vitals monitoring platform. Aileen holds the position of Vice-Chair, Digital Health, Start-ups & SMEs Committee of Asia Pacific Medical Technology Association (APACMed). She lectures and holds the position of course chair for Biomedical Informatics at Bachelor level with Singapore University of Social Sciences.
To read more, please click here.
To read about Aileen Lai's LinkedIn post, please click here.
