#1 Deterrent of Remote Patient Monitoring, Staff Bandwidth

In recent years, remote patient monitoring (RPM) has emerged as a powerful tool in healthcare, offering transformative potential for both patients and providers. With RPM, patients can track vital signs and symptoms from home while healthcare providers remotely monitor this data, making real-time interventions possible. 

It’s a game changer for improving patient and provider outcomes. 

However, despite its numerous advantages, one major deterrent to the widespread adoption of remote patient monitoring is staff bandwidth. Healthcare professionals—who are already stretched thin by demanding workloads—may struggle to incorporate additional responsibilities associated with any new initiative, not just remote patient monitoring. 

In this blog, we’ll dive into the importance of staff bandwidth, its impact on tech adoption, and how RPM companies are addressing this challenge while improving patient outcomes.

• What is RPM?
• How is RPM implemented in your organization?
• What is staff bandwidth?
• What does bandwidth have to do with RPM?
• How remote patient monitoring addresses this challenge

What is RPM?

Remote patient monitoring is the practice of using technology to collect patient biometric data regardless of location, meaning they don’t have to come all the way to the office. They can take regular readings wherever they want. 

This practice also allows healthcare providers to monitor and manage patients’ health data remotely, leading to: 

• Better health and satisfaction outcomes
• Faster, data-driven decision-making 
• Healthcare cost reduction
• Fewer hospitalizations
• And much more

Devices like blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters, and heart rate sensors transmit data directly to healthcare teams, offering continuous insight into a patient’s condition without the need for in-person visits. 

Remote care like this is particularly valuable for managing chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, as it allows for proactive rather than reactive care. By continuously monitoring key health metrics, providers can intervene earlier. This is especially true for full-service remote healthcare options, like Accuhealth, with a healthcare team in place to support that effort. 

How is RPM implemented in your organization?

Every remote patient monitoring company has its own sauce. But this work has been done enough to know what works and what simply does not. 

To successfully implement and maintain a remote patient monitoring program, an organization must integrate several components: 

• Good technology (wearable or at-home devices)
• Effective and easy-to-use software for data collection and transmission
• A ready clinical team that is responsible for reviewing and responding to the data in real-time

Patient eligibility, onboarding, and education are also huge components of success, and they should be something your vendor does for you. 

But that’s enough prefacing; let’s get to the point. 

What is staff bandwidth?

Staff bandwidth is the time, energy, and capacity healthcare professionals have to manage their daily responsibilities. We are, after all, human and only have so much in our cups. Healthcare workers know what it’s like to maintain a level of care on mere fumes.

And that person, the one you pictured in your mind, doesn’t have much bandwidth left. Leadership is always looking for new solutions to old problems in an effort to ease that burden and, ultimately, increase quality and performance. 

In larger healthcare organizations, like FQHCs and RHCs that face many limitations while simultaneously balancing a massive patient base, staff bandwidth is even more limited. 

For many, the workday is already filled to capacity with patient appointments, administrative tasks, and care coordination. With its constant influx of real-time data, the addition of RPM introduces another layer of responsibility—depending on who you ask. 

What does bandwidth have to do with RPM?

The short answer? It has everything to do with remote care solutions. 

When RPM comes to mind, people often picture the constant flow of incoming patient data that requires intense supervision. If your staff and colleagues are already inundated with their current responsibilities, adding RPM to their workload may cause delays in reviewing patient data, which can lead to missed interventions or slower responses to urgent health concerns.

Healthcare teams simply don’t have the resources (meaning time and energy) to dedicate to RPM, leading to its underutilization or mismanagement.

A lack of bandwidth also usually leads to burnout, which contributes to team losses, which makes the quality of care decline, stresses out remaining teams, and makes the entire system suffer.

In our experience, this bandwidth issue is often cited as one of the primary reasons some healthcare organizations hesitate to fully embrace RPM despite its benefits in improving patient health outcomes.

Without adequate staff bandwidth, the promise of RPM—improving patient outcomes through proactive monitoring—can become a logistical burden rather than a benefit.

How Remote Patient Monitoring Addresses This Challenge

Here at Accuhealth, we are well aware of the bandwidth issue, and we understand that solutions have to be that: actual solutions. 

First, we have our own clinical team of healthcare professionals sitting and waiting to review your patient’s flagged data and make contact with that patient based on the customizable parameters you set. 

You get to decide what a red flag is. That way, your care team will not be inundated with the additional work of sorting through mountains of readings. 

Second, remote patient monitoring tools and software are more automated and reliable than ever. Not only do we only use cellular-enabled devices that send readings manually, but we also use algorithms to support our clinical teams' response times. Readings are immediately flagged, reviewed, and the patient hears from healthcare professionals within minutes. 

Because of that, we’ve been able to help our clients cut-down on unnecessary hospitalizations and the associated healthcare costs. 

Third, patient education is a part of our promise. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. We support you wherever possible.

• We take on the work of sorting through your patient base for RPM eligibility that supports your goals for the program.
• We onboard those patients, send them devices, and train them on how to use it.
• We continuously monitor their health with trained professionals.
• We generate a monthly patient vitals report that catalogs every reading, whether or not it was flagged, any interactions based on that reading, who interacted with the patient with timestamps, etc.

We’ll Give You No Reason Not To

Our greatest competitor is doing nothing, and functioning as you always have before. Our backend systems are the best. Our software is the best. Evelyn is made so that your patients have an easy, helpful experience. Your team will have an easy, helpful experience. 

While staff bandwidth is a significant deterrent to the adoption of remote patient monitoring, it is not an insurmountable challenge—not for us. By outsourcing data monitoring to specialized teams, automating processes, and providing patient support, remote patient monitoring companies are making it easier for healthcare organizations to integrate RPM without overwhelming their staff. 

Moreover, the benefits of RPM—including improved patient health outcomes, reduced hospitalizations, and proactive chronic disease management—are too significant to ignore. With the right support systems in place, RPM can revolutionize patient care, enabling providers to deliver high-quality, timely care without the strain of additional workload.

In the end, as healthcare continues to evolve, overcoming the challenge of staff bandwidth will be critical to unlocking the full potential of Remote Patient Monitoring, transforming the way we manage chronic conditions and patient health.

What’s the First Step?

Book a demo to see how Accuhealth’s RPM service can help streamline staff workload and ease bandwidth challenges.