An Overview of Remote Care — Definition, Need, and Benefits

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed a care delivery revolution in healthcare, with disruptive digital technologies slowly phasing out long-established incumbents. Digital health has stolen the limelight. As fears of contracting COVID-19 escalated, the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies. Providers and patients alike felt safer and with remote visits and remote monitoring systems, as opposed to in-person care alone, when possible and medically appropriate. Gone are the days when patients must drive, wait and physically be present in order to receive a consultation.

Disclaimer: Virtual care can be done at home or on the go thanks to digital health applications available on your smartphone, tablet or computer, also known as remote care.

Remote Care Definitions and Alphabet Soup Uncoded

Nowadays, our lives revolve around cellphones, computers, and tablets. Naturally, the healthcare sector leverages these gadgets to rapidly scale care delivery in unprecedented ways. Digital applications help people of all age groups and sociodemographic sectors participate in the management of their own health. In its simplest form, remote care is about delivering healthcare services to patients in a manner that engages them and seamlessly integrates with their lifestyles. Further, digital health shifts healthcare away from reactive care pathways to proactive, preventative, and individualized patient-centered care. Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) has led the adoption by introducing reimbursable coding options to incentivize new digital approaches to managing complex and chronic disease. Private insurers followed suit and adopted these new codes in the management of chronic disease and mental health. However, it’s easy to get confused by the acronyms as remote care is further subdivided into individual components including Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), Chronic Care Management (CCM), Principal Care Management (PCM), Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM), and telehealth. A brief overview of the main components of remote care are below:

· Telehealth is the two-way communication by phone or video that replaces an in-person office visit.

· Chronic Care Medicine (CCM) is the management of a patient’s multiple chronic diseases outside of an office visit.

· Principal Care Management (PCM) is the management of a patient’s single chronic or complex disease outside of an office visit.

· Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is the use of devices such as blood pressure cuffs, glucometers, and scales to provide physiological data to clinicians.

· Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM) is the use of devices to collect and report subjective or therapeutic data such as pain intensity or medication response.

These distinctions are useful for coding and compliance purposes, but we shouldn’t let the bigger picture of the benefits get.

It is easy to get lost in the acronyms when looking at remote care codes and programs, but when contextualized for individual scenarios the benefits to a patient become clear.

Benefits of Remote Care

Remote care provides value to many components of the healthcare system — patients, providers, hospitals, and insurers as a whole. Benefits range from increasing access to care and opening up new channels of patient-provider communication to reducing COVID-19 spread to giving patients power over their own healthcare.

For Patients

Patients are able to use digital technologies to improve the management of their chronic medical conditions. Digital health allows better enforcement of physicians’ care plans. Once the plan is established, digital health tools allow patients to help adhere to the plan by providing the required information for self-managing chronic disease. Patients can better understand their chronic conditions through graphical representations of data and better communicate about these trends and concerns with their care team. Digital solutions are personalizing care, and personalized care can lead to improved healthcare outcomes.

For Providers

These new data streams offer providers insight into how a patient is doing at home, in-between visits. Providers are no longer guessing about what may have happened between consultations, or relying on a snapshot in time at a in-person clinic visit. Providers also benefit from having the data displayed pictorially, graphically, and in a language they can easily interpret. With data points trended and tracked, providers are able to make more informed clinical decisions as to the next best step in a patient’s care. For these reasons, providers benefit from improved efficiency, enhanced documentation and workload reduction. Physician burnout is also an issue that leads to errors in patient care, and remote care combats this by packaging required information neatly for care-delivery teams and simultaneously allowing them to be reimbursed for their time.

For Insurers and Healthcare Systems

Insurers and healthcare systems also benefit from the improved workflows, enhanced data streams and lower costs of care provided by remote care solutions. One of the more significant impacts to insurers and healthcare systems is the possibility of reducing hospital admissions, hospital readmissions and emergency room visits by moving care into the home where appropriate and allowing for a focus on prevention. These cost savings are also enjoyed by patients when they avoid in-person visits and the inconveniences associated with lost work, childcare costs, and travel expenses.

Mitigating Socioeconomic Barriers

When a patient goes to a physician with disabling pain, they expect a treatment regimen that will both be appropriate but also ease suffering. Whether, however, they receive the standard of care has been linked in peer-reviewed studies to be contingent upon socioeconomic and racial factors. With remote care, it gets easier to exclude such issues as a confounding variable in care quality. Digital tools translate patients’ symptoms into a language their providers can understand, giving patients greater access to healthcare regardless of their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic barriers.

Remote Care in Practice

In 1959 at the University of Nebraska, video communication was used for the first time for medical purposes. The evolution of remote care in 2021 has opened a plethora of opportunities. Primary care physicians can now access vital signs at home through remote patient monitoring (RPM) services. Patients can wear devices at home to provide data streams to their physicians on their blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate and more. Solutions, such as the Pain Scored product (painscored.com) from Patient Premier, Inc., are an example of how pain management providers are leveraging digital technologies to allow their patients to communicate effectively with providers and document their pain-related metrics at home in-between office visits using a mix of remote care services. Digital tools and at home wearable devices are bridging healthcare gaps to offer better insights to care teams and promote a better understanding of a patient’s chronic and complex conditions.

Verdict

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the adoption of digital health solutions, and they are here to stay as a common mode of health maintenance and management. However, the solutions in healthcare are hidden outside of plain sight and the alphabet soup of acronyms can be confusing. Remote care has the opportunity to create an enhanced care environment that can set the framework for innovation within the healthcare sector. Further adoption and integration will be accelerated by education about the meaning behind the various acronyms, expansion of reimbursement codes, and creation of programs that encourage physicians to invest in digital technologies to achieve better health outcomes for their patients.