Most of us have been hesitant to travel to non-urgent appointments for the last two years. This has contributed to the uptick in adoption of conveniences like remote services and deliveries. In healthcare, what was initially embraced as an urgent necessity during a global health emergency can now form part of a smarter, more patient-focused future. In this future, patients donโt need to leave the comfort and safety of their homes to have a quality interaction with a healthcare provider. Patients can also receive immediate and accurate responses to outcome-critical day-to-day health issues from symptom and side effect management, through recommendations of home or OTC remedies, to personalized recommendations on nutrition and exercise routines.
In fact, EYโs 2021 healthcare trend report claims that the industry has reached a fork in the road. The dramatic changes in the delivery of care since 2020 is an opportunity to build better health experiences for clinicians and patients alike. This future revolves around advanced patient-centric technologies that transform remote patient monitoring (RPM) into actual remote healthcare.
RPM is a healthcare delivery method that uses technology to monitor patient health outside of traditional clinical settings. Itโs not a new concept. Remote health monitoring devices like glucose monitors or digital blood pressure monitors have been in use for years. More recently, next-generation RPM systems both monitor and provide alerts if certain measurements or vitals exceed normal ranges, or if patient survey answers indicate a degeneration of their condition.
During the pandemic, RPM offered healthcare providers a way to monitor patients in their homes, reducing the risk of infection. It also allowed patients to be discharged from the hospital earlier, alleviating pressure on healthcare resources.
Yet for all its benefits, RPM still has a key limitation that impedes its medical efficacy: it requires human-to-human interaction for most matters.ย No matter how advanced the RPM system, it still requires a highly trained human caregiver on the other end to interpret and react to all of the data received.
Why is this a problem? For one patient, itโs not. For a millionโฆmaybe not. For 100 million โ thereโs no way. RPM falls short at scale. Healthcare involves both monitoring and intervention โ and RPM can by definition cover only one of these. Already overstretch healthcare workers do not have the capacity to take on this additional workload, instead, they need a solution that relieves them of rote tasks and enables them to focus on the patients that need them most.
To meet the challenges of truly remote healthcare, RPM needs to evolve. Since monitoring is not sufficient, itโs time to add new capabilities that leverage field-proven technology like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to bridge the gap between patient needs and caregiver capacity.
Automated assisted self-care builds on the foundations of RPM, leveraging automation to improve care while simultaneously reducing staff workload. It assists patients in caring for themselves when possible and accelerates interactions with human providers onlyย when such interventions are truly needed. This vastly expands the scope of remote healthcare with the ability to treat larger patient populations, while still offering a patient-centric and personalized approach to remote care.
Automated remote care benefits patients, providers, caregivers, and the healthcare system as a whole by leveraging technology to offer viable and effective care outside of traditional health care delivery settings.
At todayโs healthcare crossroads, automated remote care is the direction that enables โ at scale – better overall quality of care, better clinical outcomes, and enhanced patient engagement. By merging accurate patient health data with the ability to provide patients with automated triage, we are ushering in a new world of health and wellbeing for patients, care teams, and healthcare providers.
Learn more about the revolution of automated remote care in our new white paper:
Putting the โCareโ into Remote Healthcare
