Remote Patient Monitoring to Revolutionize the Medical Industry

The acute ability of our electronic devices to monitor and record our health stats can help assist the growth of remote patient monitoring, facilitating efficient & cheaper treatment and lowering the burden on existing healthcare facilities worldwide.

Today, we carry our electronic devices everywhere we go – on our wrists, in our hands, or in our trouser pockets. This has enabled them to monitor and record our myriad day-to-day activities, including the variability of our vital stats. Such devices can help track our exercise levels and daily steps, along with recording our diets pill intake, blood pressure, heartbeat, and weight. However, it’s remarkable that the wealth of personal data captured by such devices aren’t integrated into personal healthcare, especially in today’s technologically connected world. This connectedness would significantly impact the medical world in a variety of ways – especially through telemedicine (and Remote Patient Monitoring in particular).

Medical IOT could be utilized to connect such data to our online medical records, which would trigger remote delivery of healthcare services or consultations over a telecommunications infrastructure. In both the short and long run, this would not just save cost but also result in better treatment and disease control. However, it’s how this data is then analyzed that can drive real value, identifying trends unseen to the human eye, and ultimately enabling speedier diagnosis, treatment, and even trips to the hospital. Here are a few ways in which telemedicine and analytics can change the dynamics of healthcare and lessen the pressure on already overburdened medical organizations, thereby expediting trend detection and diagnosis.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) to reduce the burden on medical organizations

Healthcare facilities in every country are under tremendous stress to cater to the demand of an ever-increasing population. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is considered one of the best healthcare systems in the world. However, it’s currently suffering due to underfunding and lack of workforce, which has placed astronomical levels of stress on its staff, quality of care, and patient safety. The doctor-to-patient ratio is constantly on the decline, leaving doctors to play ‘catch-up’ as population growth continues to soar.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), a crucial part of telemedicine, allows for the monitoring of patients outside of conventional medical scenarios e.g. in the patient’s home. This could be done via medical IOT and could result in the creation of virtual hospitals that provide remote consultation, diagnostics and treatment. Doctors could not only access the patient’s vital data but also connect through to them using video conferencing and smartphones. This would allow healthcare providers, such as NHS to evaluate, diagnose and treat patients using technology without the need for an in-person visit, or taking up an extra hospital bed.

The data that is gathered through the patient’s connected devices can be analyzed by medical professionals, using Root Cause Analysis (RCA). RCA can combine and analyze the data collected from these IoT connected devices to provide a real-time full view of the patient and their circumstances. RCA generates a data loop that can help doctors analyze how our current activity could be impacting our health and potentially reach the root cause of our medical condition much faster, providing a timely diagnosis and evacuation of a person to the most suitable facility.

Meeting the demands of an increasing geriatric population

The rise in the geriatric population is driven by an increase in life expectancy. As the number of people in this population group surge, incidences of chronic diseases also witness substantial growth. Hence, the need for constant monitoring of their medical conditions arise; and telemedicine could be the solution to help manage this growing and ever-looming reality. For example, a chronic medical condition such as cognitive heart failure affects the rate at which the heart muscles pump blood. Constant monitoring using RPM and connected devices could lead to a faster diagnosis of heart failure. To reach this speedier diagnosis, healthcare organizations can apply Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to collate the data and analyze any trends or potential high heart rate levels in the patient, which will help medical professionals to decipher what is impacting a patients’ heart rate.

‘Smart’ Remote Patient Monitoring

According to the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, the number of young people being treated for type II diabetes in on the rise. This has called for the constant monitoring of their glucose and insulin levels. RPM enables continuous glucose monitoring, sending an alert from sensors when their sugar level is high or low. RCA can then analyze the frequency of these low levels and analyze any potential contributing factors i.e. diet or level of stress. Smart home speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa could also engage in the process, reminding patients to take their medication, delivering alerts, and asking questionnaires send from the doctor.

Assimilating environmental data in RPM

The effects of climate change, as a result of anthropogenic global warming, have become more pronounced across the world. Rise in frequency and intensity of heat waves, severe air pollution, heavy flooding, and elongated droughts have led to the spread of vector-borne diseases into new areas. This has incurred an extra burden to an already overburdened healthcare system in many countries. It’s imperative that the myriad sources of environmental and meteorological data be integrated into the previous medical history of an individual to provide a comprehensive healthcare service. This could be achieved by RPM, which can access medical history, environmental data, and data from various other sensors. The assimilation of such data can provide analytic and correlative methods - vital information which can be shared with smart city and medical operation Control Centers to help cope with outbreaks of diseases such as Dengue, West Nile Fever amongst others. Other than climate change, air pollution can also place a heavy toll on people’s health. Products such as Foobot, Awair, and Air Mentor can monitor internal air quality and send an alert in case the threshold is exceeded, which can reduce incidences of cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and other respiratory diseases.

 

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