Remote Patient Monitoring: Bridging the Gap in Clinical Staffing

A lack of employees is always undesirable. COVID-19 has fatigued care staff post-pandemic, leading to more retirements and resignations, and worsening the workflow shortage. 16% of US hospitals report severe staffing shortages. This is not at all surprising, especially today when people are sick and go into quarantine more often.

Immigration restrictions and high-paying travel-registered medical staff job vacancies have led to a steady decrease in the number of clinical staff educated overseas. What is more, this staff shortage is expected to rise. Remote patient monitoring services have proved to be a valuable tool for healthcare organizations struggling to deal with a severe shortage of specialists.

The Expansion of Remote Patient Monitoring

Healthcare delivery systems across the country adopted patient care technologies like remote patient monitoring solutions, more so in the current COVID-19 times. This has in turn continued to assist shift medical services from care centers to patient’s homes. RPM is successfully managing chronic and acute ones such as renal diseases, heart stroke, and COPD.

Outsourcing and adopting the Remote Patient Monitoring services are some of the ways through which healthcare organizations can opt for Medicare reimbursement. They can provide services like device setup, training of the users, and data review. This frees up healthcare practitioners’ time, allowing them to focus on patient care rather than administrative chores.

Clinical Staff Insights from RPM’s Evidence-Based Research

According to a study, the RPM department successfully served more than 1200 patients in 18 RPM programs. This became possible with the help of a central nursing team as they are the ones who study the health information and make it possible to produce real-time treatment plans. The maintenance of constant communication between patients and clinicians allowed for real-time treatment regimens.

Another study reported that NICU nurses reported that while RPM was incorporated into management, healthcare providers were accessible. They also had ample time to explain any doubt or question the patient might have had.

This workflow enabled two monitoring nurses to concentrate on patient management only thus improving safety as well as communication. Therefore, the process provided a lot of time for the care of the patients.

Exclusive Advantages of RPM for Clinical Staff

AI and remote patient monitoring technology when used in combination have a positive impact on changing the way the medical staff operates. It provides them with new tools and approaches for improving the quality of the patient’s treatment. An RPM technology can be useful for a healthcare provider to conveniently monitor the patient’s vital signs. This eventually leads to early identification of problems to be solved hence early intervention before things get out of hand.

Besides this, the medical staff can also receive some advantages from remote patient monitoring in different aspects. The providers can spare a great deal of their time and effort and only worry about disseminating information and patients’ welfare.

Improved Workflow Efficiency: First and foremost it saves a lot of time and the least number of mistakes are made when using this tool. Due to the integration of the automated Remote Patient management system, there can be no conventional paper and pen record keeping of the patient’s records. Sometimes, if the data is outside a given range, the automated system will flag that and alert the remote patient-monitoring provider.

Secondly, remote patient management is effective in increasing the number of interactions between patients and healthcare practitioners. They also reduced the amount of time spent on long face-to-face conferences. Moreover, through the help of messaging apps and video conferencing apps, patients can directly communicate with their providers without physically meeting them remotely. This, in turn, leads to faster response time, improved results, and increased workflow.

Better Results: Remote patient monitoring services can help providers diagnose health problems while working remotely for timely solutions or medications. This in turn leads to good care and better results. For example, when a healthcare professional is monitoring a patient and at the same time is checking the vital signs a slight change can be noted and appropriate medication can be administered promptly.

Utilization of Resources: By implementing remote patient management technology, healthcare organizations can save resources proficiently. This can be achieved by putting in place a better workflow that will enable the care staff working remotely to supervise more than one patient. With this, the workload of the staff will also be cut down. Moreover, RPM helps to prevent the use of expensive hospital and ER services. In the present world of technological development, a remote patient monitoring solution is not merely a luxury, but a necessity for healthcare organizations to get the optimum utilization out of resources and to supply the best quality patient care.

Better Communication: Remote Patient Monitoring systems have the potential to enhance ways through which patients, caregivers, and other healthcare providers communicate. Communication has become easy due to the help of video conferencing, a phone call, and messaging applications.

Contentment at Work: Once the data collection, analysis, and report generation are done remotely then the care staff does not feel much pressure. Now, they can completely focus on patient care and this also gives them a sense of fulfillment. They do not experience stress or burnout.

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