In our digital age, medical tools have advanced significantly. And that’s not just true when you’re at the doctor’s office. Today, technical innovations can follow you home, making it easier to communicate your current state of health to your doctor.
Medical experts call this remote patient monitoring, or RPM for short.
To help our team stay in the know about your wellbeing day in and day out, we offer remote patient monitoring here at Medical Associates Of North Texas. We set you up with this type of monitoring at our office in Fort Worth, Texas, and you head home with one or more devices to track your health and send that data to us.
The way RPM works depends on the type of condition affecting you, but we can give you a broad overview of what to expect.
In most cases, we use the Healow app for our remote patient monitoring. We can help you download this app and set it up on your phone when you’re at our office.
Then, when you head home, you use the app to log the information your doctor has requested.
If you’re living with diabetes, for example, we might ask you to routinely report your blood glucose levels. Or, if you have hypertension, we can set you up with a blood pressure monitoring device to use at home. Some devices automatically transmit readings to us. In other cases, we may ask you to log your diastolic and systolic blood pressure in the Healow app periodically.
Ultimately, we tailor our remote patient monitoring to you and your health needs. We get you set up with any technology your specific RPM requires and train you to use it properly at home.
We also schedule periodic visits with your doctor to pair with your RPM. This way, you and your doctor can review the health data you’ve logged since your last appointment, identifying trends and the best courses of action.
RPM has been driving better health outcomes for years now. In 2017, the GAO3 (U.S. Government Accountability Office) conducted a study into remote patient monitoring. In it, healthcare providers and patients reported that RMP was a “significant factor” in improving or maintaining the quality of care.
Last year, a systematic review of existing research and data on remote patient monitoring found that its “benefits included continuous monitoring of patients to provide prompt care, improvement of patient self-care, efficient communication, increased patient confidence, visualization of health trends, and greater patient education.”
In other words, RPM can help us better stay in the loop on your current state of health while making it easier for you to be involved in protecting your own well-being.
To see if this option could be right for you, send us a message online or call our office at 972-433-7178.
