Delivering Improved Health Outcomes and Reduced Cost of Medical Care with Remote Patient Monitoring

With a growing aging population and the prevalence of chronic diseases across the world, there is an urgent need to find new ways to improve patient outcomes, increase access to care, and reduce the cost of medical care. Advancements in sensor technology, the ubiquitous availability of cellular technology, and falling costs of embedded communication devices are opening up new channels for improving patient care and quality of life. Using seamless, continuous remote patient health monitoring, healthcare providers, insurance payors, and the government are looking to significantly alter how care is provided to patients, while reducing cost of care at the same time.

Using Aeris’ cellular connectivity and IoT solutions for remote patient monitoring, medical device manufacturers and healthcare providers can be certain about achieving the highest level of patient engagement and care, regardless of their location around the globe. Your remote health monitoring device works from the moment it is powered on. With a dedicated mobile core network for M2M traffic, Aeris provides the security, and quality of service fundamental to establishing and maintaining the most reliable and stable remote patient monitoring offering.

What is remote patient monitoring?

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a form of digital technology that allows a patient to use a mobile medical device to perform tests from outside a clinic, and collects the medical and health data to securely transmit to health care professionals for remote assessment. This allows patients, such as the elderly, disabled or chronically ill, to live at home while increasing access to care and decreasing healthcare delivery costs

Helping Aging Populations Remain in their Homes and Stay Active

Healthcare is one of the world’s biggest economic challenges. Global spending on healthcare reached an estimated USD 6.6 Billion. Public health spending accounts for between 4-7% of GDP for most OECD countries.

Over 200 million people in the USA and EU suffer from one or more chronic diseases like cardiac arrhythmia, hypertension, ischemic diseases, sleep apnea, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These conditions cause substantial costs, reducing both life expectancy and quality of life.

The aging population will place further strain on healthcare systems. In 2010, there were 207 million people over 75 years of age worldwide. This figure will rise to 265 million by 2020. As healthcare system demands increase in pace with the aging population, a significantly higher burden will be placed on healthcare systems, increasing the need to achieve “value for money” within healthcare budgets. With the aging population wanting to continue living independently, at home, for as long as possible, they are looking to assisted living solutions for help.

Aeris provides numerous connected health enabling solutions designed specifically for helping individuals remain active and healthy, or enabling the aging population to remain in their homes as long as possible, and provide assisted living support including medical alert systems.

Remote Patient Monitoring for Improved Out-of-Hospital Care

All of these challenges are driving the need for out-of-hospital remote monitoring of patients to improve patient care and reduce costs. With advances in non-invasive sensor technologies, growth in availability and adoption of cellular connectivity and the falling costs of embedded communications devices, healthcare institutions are now empowered to gain valuable insight into the real-time health of at-risk or chronic patients. By passively or actively collecting data from patients wherever they are, providers, including Accountable Care Organizations, can realize benefits from reduced hospital re-admissions to shortened hospital stays to improved clinical outcomes, all while reducing costs.

Insurance companies, payors and national health systems are also pushing for more adoption of remote patient monitoring initiatives. In the US, the progressive increase of hospital re-admission penalties set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is driving hospitals to adopt telehealth solutions for remote monitoring after patients have been discharged. In the UK, the positive results from the Whole System Demonstrator project led the National Health Service to issue a mandate for 100,000 additional patients to be monitored using telehealth solutions by the end of 2013. In France, a new mandate on compliance monitoring will ensure that all new sleep therapy patients will be remotely monitored from 2013 onwards.

Benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring

The adoption of seamless, continuous, remote health monitoring has benefits for all the stakeholders in the healthcare system:

Benefits for Patients:

  • Improved health outcomes and quality of life
  • Real-time support and interventions
  • Extension of care at home after discharge, helping to prevent emergencies and re-admissions
  • Reduced hospital stays

Benefits for Care Providers:

  • Support the extension of clinical environments into a patient’s home post-discharge through remote monitoring
  • Access to increased frequency of patient health data
  • Ability to continue monitoring patient health, regardless of patient’s location, even when not at home
  • Support an increased level of accuracy for clinical monitoring readings, particularly readings that would otherwise be provided by the patient themselves
  • Increase the level of trust and reliance that physicians place in data. This is particularly important when there are a few outlying readings, which may potentially indicate an underlying problem, but which might be attributed to errors in measurement
  • Reduced costs from readmissions and reduced hospital stays

Benefits for Insurance Payors

  • Better visibility on patient compliance practices
  • More accountability from patients and care providers
  • Reduced costs of care

Advantage of Cellular Connectivity for Remote Patient Monitoring

When it comes to providing remote monitoring for patients at home, cellular connectivity is one of the most advanced options available today. With the massive adoption of smart phones and advancements in technology from 2G, 3G to LTE, cellular connectivity is available everywhere. Landlines are being disconnected all across the country, as the cost of cellular connectivity and data plans are simultaneously being greatly reduced. Cellular is quickly becoming the best option for a stable service offering. Beyond stability, there are many advantages of using cellular connectivity for remote patient home monitoring:

  • Maximum coverage across the globe
  • Seamless plug-n-play operation with no in-home installation requirements
  • No patient intervention necessary for installation – simply power on the device and it is active on the network
  • Automatic transmission of monitoring data from the device directly to the data center
  • Always on, with the ability to transmit data at any time of day
  • Can travel with the patient outside the home – especially important in assisted living scenarios
  • Cellular data connectivity is paid for by the provider, with no inconvenience for the patient
  • Better visibility around patient compliance – ensuring reimbursements
  • Real-time access to patient data for doctors – to influence better clinical outcomes even when the patient is not in the hospital
  • Continuous monitoring of patients after discharge reduces re-admission risk

Leverage Cellular Connectivity for Remote Patient Monitoring

Medical device manufacturers requiring connectivity solutions for remote patient monitoring products will find that Aeris’ service offering is unique. Unlike other providers:

  • The data from your devices are not passing through the same network that is being used for smart phone applications like YouTube, Facebook, or messaging services, due to the fact that Aeris is a specialist M2M provider with a mobile core network built exclusively for M2M applications. This provides for a higher level of data security and transmission reliability.
  • You’ll have the best coverage across North America and across over 190 countries, as Aeris uses both CDMA and GSM technologies. In North America, we have access to the radio towers of 52 carriers, to provide maximum and redundant coverage for your devices. This allows for the broadest population reach of your deployment.
  • Aeris offers real-time visibility on the status of your devices and can help identify issues in real-time. We offer alerts and thresholds that can be set to monitor any anomalies in data transmissions from your device. We can block traffic from a rogue device to avoid incurring unnecessary overage charges. This also enables you to take immediate action regarding patient compliance or device troubleshooting.
  • SMS transmissions are guaranteed, unlike solutions reliant on traditional mobile phone SMS, and Aeris provides a delivery acknowledgement.
  • Access to a suite of troubleshooting tools like forced re-registration to reset devices over the air is standard. We can also ping devices to see if they are active or not. These remote capabilities reduce the need for on-site visits to address medical device or application problems.
  • Aeris can also provide a single pane of glass portal with a dashboard for managing all your devices across CDMA and GSM networks, wherever they are deployed in the world, ensuring standard operational processes and improved efficiency.
  • Reliability is guaranteed, as Aeris offers a carrier class service with redundant data centers present in San Jose, Las Vegas and London.
  • Choosing from 2G, 3G and LTE options based on the needs of your application will be straightforward, as Aeris offers and supports these variants.
  • You’ll be able to take advantage of very competitive data rate plans, and Aeris can structure a plan to fit your business model, often unlocking the ability to launch a successful service.
  • You’ll be able to access pooling plans and 1KB rounding to minimize your total cost of ownership.