This past year, we’ve spent a lot of time covering the telehealth and RPM markets for obvious reasons. While it’s been fascinating to watch the money pour into the telehealth space, I’ve found it more interesting to watch how providers are acting and what they’re interested in when it comes to the telehealth and RPM solutions.
Most of you have probably seen the live video telehealth company list and the Remote Patient Monitoring company list that we created. Hopefully you’ve found them useful as your healthcare organization has had to navigate this new world of telehealth. What’s been interesting to watch is how each of these lists have performed on our site.
As I look over the stats for the telehealth and RPM vendor lists, the live video telehealth list saw some initial traffic, but then has largely tailed off. The RPM vendor list has seen constant and growing traffic since the start. Plus, we’ve had a whole bunch of new RPM vendors reach out to us to be added to the list of RPM companies. Very few have done so on the live video telehealth side of things.
I should mention that this isn’t a scientific study and there are a lot of things that could influence the popularity of each page. Maybe the RPM list does better on SEO than the other page. Maybe we promoted one better than the other. It’s possible we did a more comprehensive job on the live video telehealth list than the RPM company list. With these disclaimers, I believe there’s something more interesting to think about when it comes to these lists’ popularity that might be helpful as healthcare organization’s work on their RPM and telehealth strategies.
First, I think most healthcare organizations feel they have a pretty good understanding of the live video telehealth options. I’m not sure this is a totally fair assumption since not all live video telehealth companies are created equal, but I think that most healthcare organizations have this assumption. In fact, they probably assume that setting up a “video call” for them to do a telehealth visit is basically a commodity service that anyone can provide. Plus, many of them were already working with a telehealth vendor or they’ve turned to their existing vendors (often their EHR vendor) to solve their telehealth video visit problem.
Basically, most healthcare organization aren’t looking for a new live video telehealth vendor. They’re already there or plan to use their existing vendors that are now offering these solutions.
The same can not be said for RPM (Remote Patient Monitoring). Based on my conversations, most healthcare organizations are still trying to figure out which RPM solutions are best. Do they need to have multiple solutions or is there one that can satisfy all their RPM needs going forward across a wide variety of clinical categories?
The reality in the RPM space is that there’s not a well defined market and there’s still a lot of creation and discovery that’s happening. RPM is far from a commodity and so healthcare organizations have to do a lot more research to understand all of the different RPM platforms, approaches, devices, etc. There’s no clear market leader in the space and it’s not a service like live video telehealth that can be easily tacked on by their existing vendors.
In many ways, the RPM market feels very much like the EHR market felt 15 years ago. Every healthcare organization realizes they need to do something there, but they’re not sure which solution is the best option for them to choose going forward. Said another way, 5 years from now the live video telehealth solutions will likely be very similar to what we use today. 5 years from now the RPM solutions and platforms will be drastically different and more mature compared to what you can buy today.
There are three areas of RPM development where we’ll see these massive changes. First, the devices used to capture our health information are innovating quickly. Along with wearables and other physical health sensors, we’re seeing the rapid development of a wide variety of “invisible” sensors that can monitor your health with zero need for you to interact or wear the sensor.
Second, our understanding of health data is evolving quickly. In some cases this is understanding the data we already have like EHR data, but even more exciting is combining that data with external data and the aforementioned health sensor data that will provide a near real time look at a patient’s health. The AI and systems that will evaluate all of this data which leads to specific actions is going to become much more intelligent and effective.
Third, how we communicate, educate, and influence patients is evolving quickly. Healthcare has long lived in the paradigm of treating the chief complaint. Communicating a treatment plan for a chief complaint is very different than motivating a patient to take part in healthy behaviors. Developing this type of sophisticated communication that is personalized to the patient is evolving rapidly.
To add to this, each of the above evolutions in RPM is going to take place across every disease state and the answers are likely not going to be the same across diseases. Will a company roll up the best solutions across each disease? Will one company invest in enough diseases to be a one stop shop for handling remote patient monitoring for an organization across their spectrum of needs? This is going to be interesting to watch.
What’s clear to me today is that healthcare organizations want to be involved in RPM. How they should be involved is not clear right now. However, the only way they can get their organization to that point is for them to take part in the RPM learning process. There’s going to be some bumps along the way, but those that take part in the bumps will be better prepared to know what works and what doesn’t work with RPM in the future.
