Healthcare staff plays an important role in patient care. Their availability and efficiency help in creating better health outcomes. The problem arises when there is not enough staff as compared to the patient requirement. The onslaught of COVID-19 brought upon increased demands of patient care and the healthcare industry had to face significant challenges due to long patient backlogs, lack of resources, and shortage of staff. Patients’ safety may be in danger in healthcare institutions if there are not enough nurses on duty. Staff who are overworked may experience exhaustion or burnout, which can make it difficult for them to concentrate on responsibilities. Medical blunders, a lack of involvement, and neglected nursing care can all result from this loss of concentration. Understaffed institutions are more likely to have higher rates of in-hospital mortality, infection risk, surgical complications, and falls among their patients.
Role Of Remote Patient Monitoring
Demand greatly outstripping supply is the root of the issue. Healthcare requirements expand as new therapies become accessible and the population gets older, necessitating ever-evolving and more complex treatment trajectories. More patients and healthcare services are turning to remote patient monitoring (RPM) services as healthcare providers frantically try to spare clinicians and professionals from the more tedious or typical chores so they may manage more demanding patients.
RPM is currently changing the way healthcare is provided, leading to quicker access, lower costs, and better patient results. Its growth was fueled by COIVD-19, as hospital visits were limited. After the pandemic ended, the use of Remote Patient Monitoring grew substantially as patients were hesitant to go back to in-person visits. Now, the ultimate goal of most healthcare practitioners is to have accessible healthcare in every home that requires it. By enabling patients to receiving care in the convenience of their own homes—where an increasing number of patients are being diverted to relieve the pressure on overcrowded and understaffed hospitals and emergency departments—remote patient monitoring (RPM) tackles the healthcare shortfall. Several of the benefits of RPM include reduced travel time, lower healthcare delivery costs, quicker access to care, and improved patient-provider communication. RPM helps reduce task overload in the following ways:
Collecting Data
With the help of Remote Patient Monitoring, healthcare providers can employ tools and technology that helps monitor patients from afar instead of the hassle of checking in room to room in hospitals. It results in a lot of saved time. Providers are able to efficiently utilize their time, making timely check-ins with their patients’ vitals. Offering them necessary reminders and assist them in achieving long-term health goals.
With remote patient monitoring technology, patients, caregivers, and home health aides can all keep track of important details such as a patient’s vital signs, physical and mental status, eating habits, and medication adherence. This lessens the need for in-person medical care by decreasing readmission rates and preventing unforeseen visits to the ER, which can overburden personnel and increase healthcare expenditures therefore it’s preferable to avoid them.
Accessible Healthcare
The number of patients who need in-person treatment can be decreased with the help of remote patient monitoring in healthcare institutions. A healthcare professional will need to be on duty around-the-clock to monitor patients who are post-operatively healing and those who have severe chronic conditions. With the use of digital health apps, healthcare professionals may remotely monitor these patients. Providers can use this technology to improve health outcomes and prevent future emergencies by having 24/7 access to their patients. By lowering in-person home visits while providing the same number or more actual contacts, the healthcare professional can likewise decrease patient visits while accepting a larger number of patients.
Patient Engagement
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) supports the plan of care, the clinical assessment, and the patient’s education in addition to adding to the availability of healthcare by keeping track of the patient’s biometrics, vital signs, and symptoms. For instance, nurses frequently spend 10% or less of their time educating patients on their diagnosis and available treatments. With digital health tools, nurses can educate patients quickly and efficiently.
Studies have shown that patients who make an effort to learn more about their healthcare processes end up achieving their health goals and show improvement.
Task Automation
By streamlining their regular tasks, healthcare professionals can spend more time caring for patients and less time performing duplicate steps and manual processes. Basic healthcare tasks assigned to highly skilled specialists can result in an unbalanced healthcare system. By assigning workers with little training to tasks that require only the competence of less skilled employees, healthcare services can be rendered more efficiently. Volunteers, community health workers, and sufficient supervision and support via remote patient monitoring from expert healthcare providers can all help to make up for this scarcity.
Conclusion
In this age, using Remote Patient Monitoring software is crucial for physicians to lessen the workload on already overworked teams, all the while technology is revolutionizing the look and functionality of medical equipment. Patient user experience must be improved, patient and provider trust must be increased, and most crucially, patient health outcomes must be improved by providing devices that are ready to use and operate right out of the box. Thus, it all comes down to choosing the right RPM system. CareCloud’s Remote Patient Monitoring system helps reduce administrative burden while providing a platform for providers to stay connected with their patients.
