the future of patient monitoring: what's now, what's next

In the field of medicine, remote patient monitoring, also known as telemedicine, is one of the most interesting stories of the 21st century. It involves the use of high-tech gadgets to keep track of patients’ health progress and send information to doctors. This simplifies the patient monitoring process and sometimes allows patients to receive full care in remote locations, or even without leaving home.

What Is the Future of Remote Patient Monitoring?

This technology has the potential to reduce the inconvenience of stringent medication regimens and can be part of creating safer and more standardized processes. This shifts the focus of practitioners and professionals to patient care, since they have more time.

It also helps in improving the efficiency of healthcare and eventually reducing costs. It promises an increase in the accessibility and improves the value of care for both the patients and the care providers.

With this technology, it is easy to reach under-serviced communities. The combination of this technology and other technologies, such as improving the speed of internet connectivity will play a big role in boosting smarter healthcare. Other than providing smarter healthcare, this technology is also going to prove useful in educating health practitioners.

It will be easier for people living in inaccessible areas to access healthcare. This is because the high-tech devices have the ability to break geographic barriers. This greatly improves the diagnosis and management of chronic conditions.

Remote patient monitoring will aid in research. For instance, in a study conducted in Italy to evaluate compliance of patients with the required standards, the researchers had a challenge due to lack of accurate data on patients with the chronic diseases from the administrative database. This is because the administrative database does not record the diagnosis for outpatient patients.

Challenges in Remote Patient Monitoring

As RPM catches on, medical cybersecurity is of paramount importance. Patient information must be protected using the best methods available, steadily updated.

One of the challenges facing this technology is the difficulty of convincing patients to use digital apps. Some patients are not willing to pay for the apps, which can be discouraging for app developers and risk-taking leaders in the field.

Nonetheless, remote patient monitoring has seen great progress since innovation and continues to develop. What challenges there are can be overcome by applying our best thinking and our best new innovations, such as blood microsampling technology, a key element in patient monitoring.