Why Remote Patient Monitoring and Treatment Is So Important to Healthcare

This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

When you think about healthcare, you often think of a visit to a doctor’s office or hospital. No doubt that is healthcare as we know it today, but that’s quickly changing. Doctors and hospitals need to wake up to the new healthcare world where you’re paid to keep patients healthy as opposed to treating the chief complaint.

It’s not surprising that we do a poor job managing patients’ health when you consider how much time our current healthcare providers get to spend with the patient. Most patient visits are between 15-30 minutes. In fact, one study showed that doctors see a patient every 11 minutes on average.

Let’s be generous and say that each one of us spends 15 minutes with a doctor once a month and that’s likely being generous for most of us that are even relatively healthy. My simple math says that would add up to us spending about 180 minutes (3 hours) each year with our doctor. There are 8760 hours in a year and so that means we spend about 0.0342% of our life with our doctor each year.

Is it any wonder that our doctors only have time to treat our chief complaint and can’t really help us be and remain healthy when they see us so little?

This simple analysis is why remote patient monitoring is so important to healthcare. We spend exponentially more time outside of our current healthcare system than we do in it. Our understanding of what happens outside the hospital and doctor’s office must change if we’re going to make a dent in the trillions of dollars we spend on healthcare.

The great thing is that we’re starting to see a reinvention of health care with things like mobile medical apps. Previous to the smartphone, how would you have monitored a patient remotely? Sure, we had some bluetooth connected devices that we sent home and people attached to their computers, but that was always cumbersome and fraught with technical challenges. Now we have an always on, always connected device that’s nearly attached to most of us at all times. Many of these devices even come with built-in health sensors. These devices are making remote patient monitoring possible

I don’t fault doctors for not really treating the entire patient in the past. First, they performed the services they were paid to provide. They weren’t paid or given the time to treat the whole patient. Second, the technology wasn’t available for them to scale their remote patient monitoring and treatment efforts. However, we’re seeing both of these things changing as we speak.

Now that I’ve made the case for remote patient monitoring and treatment, what technologies and approaches have you seen be most successful in this space?

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About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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