JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. RPM programs commonly incorporate tools to capture and transmit health relevant data from the home to the clinical space to augment the clinical decision-making process of health care providers. Examples of data captured include patient behaviors such as degree of medication adherence and physical activity, safety-related events such as falls, and physiological parameters such as blood pressure and blood glucose concentration. In some cases, real-time analysis of captured data may be performed to enable rapid clinical decision-making. Given the potential to improve patient health outcomes, healthcare systems around the world are actively engaged in fashioning, implementing, and exploring the outcomes of various RPM program models, each envisioned to improve patient care in a sufficiently effective and efficient manner to produce value. However, new challenges to healthcare systems include increasing RPM program enrollment, optimizing condition-specific RPM programs to best address the needs of specific patient groups, integrating new RPM-derived data streams into existing information technology infrastructures, overcoming limited availabilities of desired remote monitoring technologies, and quantifying the health outcomes produced by RPM utilization. Herein, we identify stakeholders for RPM in the US, summarize the landscape of RPM tools available for chronic disease management, discuss the current regulatory environment, delve into the benefits and challenges of integrating these tools into clinical practice, summarize aspects of coverage and reimbursement, and examine the knowledge gaps regarding sustained use of RPM in clinical practice along with associated opportunities.