JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Patient and staff experiences are vital factors to consider in the evaluation of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) interventions. However, the current landscape of patient and staff experience measuring in RPM suffers from a lack of methodological standardization, affecting the quality of both primary and secondary research in this domain.

Objective:

This review aims at obtaining a comprehensive set of experience constructs and corresponding measurement instruments used in contemporary RPM research, and at proposing an initial set of guidelines for improving methodological standardization in this domain.

Methods:

Full-text articles reporting on instances of patient or staff experience of RPM interventions, written in English, and published after January 1st 2011 were considered for eligibility. By RPM intervention, we refer to interventions including sensor-based patient monitoring used for clinical decision-making; articles reporting on other kinds of interventions were therefore excluded. Articles describing primary care interventions, involving participants under 18 years of age, or focusing on attitudes or technologies rather than specific interventions were also excluded. We searched two electronic databases, Medline (PubMed) and EMBASE, on the 12th of February 2021.We explored and structured the obtained corpus of data through correspondence analysis, a multivariate statistical technique.

Results:

158 articles were included, covering RPM interventions in a variety of domains. From these studies, we reported 546 instances of experience measuring in RPM, covering the use of 160 unique experience measuring instruments used to measure 120 unique experience constructs. We found that the research landscape has seen a sizeable growth in the past decade, that it is affected by a relative lack of focus on the experience of staff, and that the overall corpus of collected experience measures can be organized in four main categories (service-system-related; care-related; usage and adherence-related; and health outcomes-related). In the light of the collected findings, we provide a set of six actionable recommendations to RPM patient and staff experience evaluators, both in terms of what to measure and of how to measure it. Overall, we suggest RPM researchers and practitioners to develop integrated, interdisciplinary data strategies for continuous RPM evaluation.

Conclusions:

The landscape of patient and staff experience measuring in RPM can be organized by distinguishing four main categories of experience measures (service-system-related; care-related; usage and adherence-related; and health outcomes-related). Researchers interested in improving quality and standardization in their RPM research protocols can do so by following a set of six actionable recommendations.. Ultimately, patient and staff experience measures should be integrated within broad RPM data strategies, intended as the processes and rules defining how to manage, analyze, and act upon RPM data, including continuously collected experience data, and clinical, technical and administrative data.