ANCOR News - 10.15.18

RPM – A New Revenue Opportunity

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Remote Patient Monitoring, or RPM, represents the next big step in reducing costs while simultaneously drastically improving the quality of patient care information. RPM generally refers to technologies that allow devices such as cardiac monitors, enteral feeding pumps, and even prescription bottles in the patient’s home to send vital information back to health care providers.

The goal is to improve clinical outcomes and reduce readmissions by ensuring that appropriate clinical staff are quickly alerted to out-of-range conditions. In this way, the average cost per episode can be decreased by decreasing the number of unnecessary readmissions. Eventually, the hope is to explore new methods to even interact with the patient without the provider personally being present.

For providers, this represents a new revenue opportunity.  With new ICD-9 codes for RPM, providers can receive reimbursements of $150 – $200 per patient per month. Meanwhile costs for enabling RPM are only a fraction of that amount. Sprint is a leader in this field and has a complete solution for providing the connectivity and sophisticated monitoring tools that make up a comprehensive remote monitoring system.

The tools developed for RPM will allow home monitoring of every patient, not just the chronically ill. Ultimately this could give rise to lifestyle monitoring such as incentive-based monitoring (high activity levels = better health).