Research by McKinsey has revealed that up to 7 in every 10 digital transformation projects don’t end up successful. Among the possible reasons for failure is a lack of long-term commitment and the absence of an elaborate vision. To avoid that and ensure your care facility gets off to a flying start with its remote patient monitoring program, it’s important to approach its implementation strategically. Our guide today will show you just how to do that. We’ll also be revealing what your facility stands to gain as we unearth the outcomes of successful RPM programs.
Finding success with your RPM implementation
Over the years, Aura Health has aided many care facilities of various clinical workflow scales to roll out their remote patient monitoring program. Consequently, we have gathered several best practices that will assist your care facility to also make the transition without hitches. Here they are:
1. Start with a pilot program
Before you go all out with your RPM implementation, you want to, first of all, test the waters by way of a pilot program. This entails deploying the remote patient monitoring solution to just a few of your patients and seeing how it goes before you proceed from there.
Here’s why it’s important to test drive your RPM program on a small scale first:
- Reduced risk on your part
- You’ll discover unique variables in your healthcare model that you need to keep in mind going forward
- Faster implementation when you eventually go full scale as your practice will have gotten the hang of things
2. Be patient
It may take time to get your RPM program going and the problem with most care facilities is that they throw in the towel way too soon because they expect instant success. Once they get little to no results after their implementation, they are quick to term it a failure.
Say you want to bump up profits for your revenue and you see RPM as one of the solutions to achieve this. After 2 weeks of implementation, revenue increases by just 2%. While this result may look small, the sum of its benefits can gradually be huge. In this case, you stand to bump up profits by 48% within the initial year, which is not a feat that you can sweep under the rug. In a nutshell, it’s important to be patient and think about your results as pertain to the bigger picture or the long term.
3. Define goals first
Most care facilities jump into remote patient monitoring without having a clear definition of what they set out to achieve. Remember, not planning is planning to fail so you want to be clear on your goals for the project, for instance:
- Are you trying to increase revenue? Then define the exact profit margins you hope to gain from RPM
- Is patient satisfaction your priority? Simply stating enhancing patient satisfaction is not good enough. You want to consider numbers on your retention levels or get feedback by way of surveys
- Are you trying to lower readmissions? Then track your rehospitalization rates before and after the RPM rollout
Outcomes of a successful remote patient monitoring
The great thing about a well-implemented remote patient monitoring solution is that it helps you achieve your goals while simultaneously unlocking many other benefits as well. From our first-hand experience, here are the outcomes some of our clients have been able to achieve with our remote patient monitoring technology
1. Reduced readmission rates
Readmissions are not good for any care facility. It speaks to poor care coordination and casts a dark cloud over your practice and its competence. Fortunately, with Aura Health’s remote patient monitoring technology, you can down readmissions by 40% or more.
Here’s why RPM results in the reduction of rehospitalization:
- Constant access to non-essential and essential parameters
- Early detection of patient deterioration due to timely alerts
- Alleviation of HAIs due to virtual visits over in-person appointments
2. Net patient revenue improves
What can hospitals do to increase revenue? Implementing a remote patient monitoring program with the support of an experienced RPM provider is one way to go. For example, your facility stands to increase its monthly net patient revenue by between $150-200 through Medicare reimbursements alone. With some private insurers increasingly providing PRM reimbursements in 2023, practices could earn even more in the coming months.
So say you get 300 patients signed up for your program. In this case, you stand to gain an additional monthly revenue of at least $45,000. Besides adding to your financial cash flow, RPM can also ease other expenses, namely those the hospital incurs due to readmissions, and in-person physician visits. In fact, studies indicate that RPM is set to offset $200 billion in healthcare expenses worldwide in the coming two decades.
3. Boosted staff productivity
Care facilities found themselves facing the heat of clinical staff shortages with the coronavirus setting in. But even a couple of years later, many clinical workflows around the world are still grappling with deficiencies in expertise and have never recovered.
With remote patient monitoring on your side, however, you can not only shore up these gaps but even further boost the productivity of your resident staff. Here’s the full scoop on how RPM achieves this:
- Virtual visits can save time and expenses that go into in-person appointments. Physicians can therefore channel more resources into other workflow duties
- RPM solutions can also further free up time by automating certain data upload tasks that clinical staff typically perform, primarily when feeding data to an EHR
- Physicians can get ready reports and even delegate monitoring duties to a trusted third party such as Aura Health
Turn to a proven RPM service to find success
Remote patient monitoring programs have several positive outcomes for practices. Besides those we’ve discussed here today, care facilities also stand to improve patient satisfaction, enhance the quality of life for patients, and optimize chronic disease management. To find success in the implementation of your remote monitoring program, you also need a tried and tested partner to help you get started and ease the transition. Contact us today to get all your questions answered about implementing a successful RPM program
is Aura’s proprietary digital healthcare platform
