In recent years, remote patient monitoring (RPM) has emerged as a powerful tool in healthcare, offering transformative potential for both patients and providers. With RPM, patients can track vital signs and symptoms from home while healthcare providers remotely monitor this data, making near real-time updates and proactive interventions possible.

It significantly enhances patient and provider outcomes.

However, despite its numerous advantages, one major deterrent to the widespread adoption of remote patient monitoring is staff bandwidth. Healthcare professionals—who are already stretched thin by demanding workloads—may struggle to incorporate additional responsibilities associated with any new initiative, not just remote patient monitoring.

In this blog, we’ll dive into the importance of staff bandwidth, its impact on tech adoption, and how RPM companies are addressing this challenge while improving patient outcomes.

What is RPM?

Remote patient monitoring is the practice of using technology to collect patient biometric data regardless of location, meaning they don’t have to come all the way to the office. They can take regular readings wherever they want.

This practice also allows healthcare providers to monitor and manage patients’ health data remotely, leading to:

• Better health and satisfaction outcomes
• Faster, data-driven decision-making
• Healthcare cost reduction
• Fewer hospitalizations
• And much more

Devices like blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters, and heart rate sensors transmit data directly to healthcare teams, offering continuous insight into a patient’s condition without the need for in-person visits.

Remote care like this is particularly valuable for managing chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, as it allows for proactive rather than reactive care. By continuously monitoring key health metrics, providers can intervene earlier. This is especially true for comprehensive remote healthcare options, like accuRPM, powered by Tellihealth, with a healthcare team in place to support that effort.

How is RPM implemented in your organization?

Every remote patient monitoring company has its own sauce. But this work has been done enough to know what works and what simply does not.

To successfully implement and maintain a remote patient monitoring program, an organization must integrate several components:

• Good technology (wearable or at-home devices)
• Effective and user-friendly software for data collection and transmission
• A ready clinical team that is responsible for reviewing and responding to the data in near real-time

Patient eligibility, onboarding, and education are also huge components of success, and they should be something your vendor does for you.

But that’s enough prefacing; let’s get to the point.

What is staff bandwidth?

Staff bandwidth is the time, energy, and capacity healthcare professionals have to manage their daily responsibilities. We are, after all, human and only have so much in our cups. Healthcare workers know what it’s like to maintain a level of care on mere fumes.

And that person, the one you pictured in your mind, doesn’t have much bandwidth left. Leadership is always looking for new solutions to old problems in an effort to ease that burden and, ultimately, increase quality and performance.

In larger healthcare organizations, like FQHCs and RHCs that face many limitations while simultaneously balancing a massive patient base, staff bandwidth is even more limited.

For many, the workday is already filled to capacity with patient appointments, administrative tasks, and care coordination. With its constant influx of near real-time data, the addition of RPM introduces another layer of responsibility—depending on who you ask.

What does bandwidth have to do with RPM?

The short answer? It has everything to do with remote care solutions.

When RPM comes to mind, people often picture the constant flow of incoming patient data that requires intense supervision. If your staff and colleagues are already inundated with their current responsibilities, adding RPM to their workload may cause delays in reviewing patient data, which can lead to missed interventions or slower responses to urgent health concerns.

Healthcare teams simply don’t have the resources (meaning time and energy) to dedicate to RPM, leading to its underutilization or mismanagement.

A lack of bandwidth also usually leads to burnout, which contributes to team losses, which makes the quality of care decline, stresses out remaining teams, and makes the entire system suffer.

In our experience, this bandwidth issue is often cited as one of the primary reasons some healthcare organizations hesitate to fully embrace RPM despite its benefits in improving patient health outcomes.

Without adequate staff bandwidth, the promise of RPM—improving patient outcomes through proactive monitoring—can become a logistical burden rather than a benefit.

How Remote Patient Monitoring Addresses This Challenge

Here at accuRPM, powered by Tellihealth, we are well aware of the bandwidth issue, and we understand that solutions have to be actual solutions.

First, we have our own clinical team of healthcare professionals sitting and waiting to review your patient’s flagged data and make contact with that patient based on the customizable parameters you set.

You get to decide what a red flag is. That way, your care team will not be inundated with the additional work of sorting through mountains of readings.

Second, remote patient monitoring tools and software are more automated and reliable than ever. We only use cellular-enabled devices that send readings manually, and we also use algorithms to support our clinical teams' response times. Readings are promptly flagged, reviewed, and patients typically hear from healthcare professionals quickly.

Because of that, we have helped clients reduce unnecessary hospitalizations and the associated healthcare costs.

Third, patient education is a part of our promise. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. We support you wherever possible.

• We take on the work of sorting through your patient base for RPM eligibility that supports your goals for the program.
• We onboard those patients, send them devices, and train them on how to use them.
• We continuously monitor their health with trained professionals.
• We generate a monthly patient vitals report that catalogs every reading, any interactions based on that reading, who interacted with the patient, and timestamps.

Our software provides proven value and effective results. Patients have a supportive, user-friendly experience. Teams have a supportive, streamlined experience.

While staff bandwidth is a significant deterrent to the adoption of remote patient monitoring, it is not an insurmountable challenge—not for us. By outsourcing data monitoring to specialized teams, automating processes, and providing patient support, RPM companies make it easier for healthcare organizations to integrate RPM without overwhelming their staff.

What’s the First Step?

Book a demo to see how accuRPM, powered by Tellihealth, can help streamline staff workload and ease bandwidth challenges.