You might think of remote health monitoring in terms of patient monitoring after a hospital release, but monitoring healthy patients can help catch problems as they develop.

While gathering any and all RPM requires explicit patient permission and a formal patient-doctor relationship, you can maintain HIPPA compliance whether you provide the monitoring equipment or your patient shares access to their data generated by a personal device such as an Apple Watch.

You can help your patients and reduce your own workload by harnessing the power of Big Data acquisition. While a small practice may not think of its 100 or fewer patients as producing Big Data, when discussing real-time gathering and automated analysis of health data, the term applies.

When you draw data from all patients, you enable your practice to aggregate data and create profiles of patient types. You can also analyze what each of your own heart patients or diabetic patients, etc. does differently to pinpoint high health achievers that overcome disease or more effectively manage the disease. This can provide insights that other local patients can also implement to improve their health since local data references local opportunities. For example, national data might reference cardiac patients improving their outcomes by joining a gym and working out three to five times per week. This might include specific workouts developed with a personal trainer. However, you may live in a rural area that has no gym nor access to personal trainers. Identifying the patients local to you in your own practice who perform well and effectively manage their disease provides an opportunity to determine what they do differently and recommend that activity to other patients.

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While national health data points to trends, local health data can help your practice offer better care. That increases patient satisfaction which turns into increased referrals by word-of-mouth. When your practice grows, you earn more money.

In another example, you might discover one patient whose vital signs and weight management improve at a greater rate than others. When you inquire what they did, they may respond that they consulted a dietician online to customize their diet. You can then partner with an online dietician service to offer your patients this opportunity with a discount. This encourages more patients to participate and to maintain diets developed specifically for them that they follow more closely because they like the foods on them.

Monitoring health data and analyzing it en masse as well as individually can result in improved patient outcomes when applied appropriately. Use a combination of the patient provided health monitors and a remote health monitoring tool.