Page 19 - HME Business, August/September 2019

hears the coughing and alerts the parents via
a baby monitoring-style app. Well, different coughs have different sounds, so an AI app is able to determine if the cough is viral or bacte- rial. The device asks mom and dad if they want to order some flu medicine. The same scenario plays out in households with similar devices in the local area, and other apps forewarn physi- cians, schools, senior centers, etc.
This concept was described by Jeff Cribbs,
a vice president of research for the Gartner Industries Research group, in his keynote at the June VGM Heartland event, and it speaks to a very attainable and foreseeable health future using here-and-now technology.
So, throwing RPM into such a future isn’t hard to imagine at all. For instance, a remote moni- toring system for sleep therapy patients could integrate all sorts of other health metrics and data on daily activities to get a complete picture of how patients are managing their overall health as it relates to sleep apnea.
The question is, what will be the give and take between what’s happening now in the HME industry, and what’s happening in other corners of healthcare? Moreover, how will this impact
HME providers businesses and the care they help facilitate in the process?
WHERE WE STAND
Bearing that in mind, let’s briefly review where RPM has come in its quick development. Remote patient monitoring is a capability well known
and long enjoyed by providers of sleep therapy solutions. In a remote patient monitoring care continuum, PAP devices can monitor patient performance and feed that data back to care management systems that physicians can use to see unique health events and tweak care. Those devices can also connect with personal apps that patients use to better manage their care.
Moreover, those devices also help demon- strate patients’ therapy compliance and prog- ress, which is critical in terms of reimbursement. Physicians and clinical staff can demonstrate that patients are sticking with their therapy and benefitting from it, so the payer should continue to fund use of the device. The HME provider,
the referral partner, and certainly the patient all benefit from that. So much so that the model has become the norm.
Bearing that in mind
“I would say is that the ability to monitor and then, more importantly, efficiently manage patients by leveraging remote patient, or technology-based tools, is really becoming
the standard of care,” explains Tim Murphy, business leader of the New Business Solutions group at Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care. “And each of the constituents has now, kind
of, built their mindset around that standard of care. That connectivity of a therapy device for
a sleep patient in a home really now serves the value that each of those constituents is trying to contribute.”
And how deeply has RPM taken root in sleep?
“Remote monitoring capabilities continue to expand within sleep therapy since ResMed first built connectivity into all its new PAP devices
in 2014,” notes Gregory Dench, Director of Connected Devices for ResMed. “Today more than 10 million patients worldwide have a cloud- connectable ResMed device. HMEs by and large have embraced the adoption – and benefits – of remote monitoring.
“... Additionally, ResMed will exponentially grow its database of 4.5 billion nights of sleep data, to conduct more large-scale clinical studies
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
hme-business.com | August/September 2019 | HMEBusiness 19