How Remote Patient Monitoring Enhances Nurse Workflows

How Remote Patient Monitoring Improves Health Outcomes

RPM can help providers get a faster read on patients, especially those with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, says Todd Bellemare, senior vice president of strategic solutions at Definitive Healthcare. He adds that RPM can also help providers understand behavior barriers that can get in the way of medication adherence and daily readings like blood sugar levels.

“The patient can short circuit some of those expensive patient interventions like going to the emergency department,” Bellemare says.

In a recent study by the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, the use of RPM devices decreased hospitalizations by 65 percent and emergency department visits by 44 percent for COPD patients.

“We’ve talked for 20 years about prevention and maintenance as opposed to just treating the symptoms of a disease in the end,” Bellemare says. “RPM offers us an opportunity to put into practice all of those conversations about maintenance and prevention that we’ve had for the last 20 years.”

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Nurses Respond to Remote Patient Monitoring Adoption

The bandwidth of nurses has been shrinking over the years, with the stress of the pandemic being overwhelming to many, Bellemare says.

“That time spent directly with patients is such a huge component of the why of what they’re doing and why they’re in that profession in the first place,” Bellemare says. “Once you start adding all of these ancillary administrative burdens to them, it becomes almost unbearable.”

Though some nurses view the addition of more technologies as additional administrative work and a threat to their roles. In 2021, National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association issued a joint statement saying that Kaiser Permanente’s “healthcare-at-home” initiative would undermine nurses’ role in care.

In a 2020 Journal of Internet Research report, half of nurses surveyed reported feeling distressed by RPM adding more to mounting workloads. Even so, all nurses stated that RPM increased patient safety.

“If hospitals and health systems can find a way to reduce that administrative burden and technical burden on the nurses, their workplaces will fare much better,” Bellemare says.

Tips for Better Remote Patient Monitoring Implementation

It is important that healthcare organizations understand the additional work that comes with different RPM devices before implementing, says Bellemare. Because of the wide range of RPM devices and interoperability, some devices deliver data via a PDF and providers have to manually key that data into the electronic health record. While others can match data directly into existing EHR systems.

“If a nurse is trying to read a PDF of a printout from someone’s RPM device, and then trying to plug it into their electronic record, that’s time away from doing the things that they feel are the best part about their job for both themselves and their patients,” Bellemare says.

A remote care policy is also valuable to ensure that technologies aren’t taking precedence over the mission of patient care, Malone says.

“There should be some kind of umbrella policy that says, we work to make sure that care being delivered at home or remotely is of a high quality as the care being delivered at a hospital,” Malone says. “And to do that, we do these things to make sure of that. There’s something to refer to so that every nurse or doctor understands this is the policy of this institution.”

Malone says that allowing nurses to be at the table when IT decisions are made ensures that new technology is useful for providers.

“We know that when nurses are at the table, better decisions are made around technology and innovations, better systems are developed, and funding is given for those systems to operate effectively,” Malone says.

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