Remote Patient Monitoring Innovations Are Revolutionising Healthcare Forever

The global healthcare industry has been evolving rapidly. With the advent of tools and trends like wearable technology, 3D printing, robotics, and more, it’s clear that an industry once known for being notoriously resistant to change has had no choice but to roll with the punches. Notably, the past few years have seen a rise in the embrace of telehealth, with the market projected to grow to US$523 billion by 2030.

However, while telehealth tools are helpful for issues such as accessibility, price points, and overall convenience, there are still a few obstacles to overcome. For one, although you can diagnose a case using a variety of telehealth equipment, each gadget has its own mobile app, website, and protocols to handle patient data. This means aggregating patient data through remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools can be an extremely arduous and complicated process. 

Additionally, since healthcare specialists need as much data as possible to be able to make accurate diagnoses and adjust treatments as needed, sending each set of data individually might lower the efficiency and speed of healthcare service, consequently potentially raising the associated costs.

In an effort to solve this, there are new tools available that connect a variety of devices using the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), including TeleMedHub’s offerings. This infrastructure simplifies the integration of Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) into consolidated electronic medical records (EMR). Doctors, medical teams, and even biomedical engineers can order and receive patient data directly from these EMRs — in fact, the data payloads can even be sent in real-time for every measurement into existing PGHD flowsheets. 

As a result, a patient can connect more than 500 Bluetooth and WiFi devices from dozens of manufacturers to one application, removing the issue of several individual connections for the patient and dozens of open dashboards for doctors. This also allows users to transmit their data from almost any wearable source, from services like Garmin, Fitbit and Oura to IoMT manufacturers such as AnD, Omron, Contec, and LifeScan.

This congregation of RPM tools is particularly pertinent for patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, congestive heart failure, or arterial hypertension. Thanks to applications like this, the whole measurement process is simple and transparent, as measurement devices are auto-detected, with measurements automatically sent to the backend system. Using these platforms, doctors can prescribe home care therapy for a patient, including self-measurement of various vital signs and other actions to obtain data for effective treatment.

It’s clear to the industry that this is the future of healthcare — automated monitoring and collated data will pave the way for near-instant remote care. Patients and doctors will be able to benefit from a reliable remote doctor’s assistant, and therefore healthcare practitioners will be given the chance to provide proactive and corrective treatment during non-critical or critical moments. 

Here in Malaysia, with programmes like MRANTI’s Global Accelerator Programme supporting innovative telemedicine solutions like TeleMedHub, hopefully telehealth will see a lot more applications nationwide. In general, through these innovations, the quality of global medical care will increase exponentially,  providing future technology-oriented doctors with a new generation of medicine.

This article is provided by Elliot & Co.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.