Setting the Standard for Future Remote Patient Monitoring and Telehealth Solutions

The first panelist to speak was Dr. Francis Campion, Principal Lead Digital Health and Group Leader for Health AI, MITRE. He focused on what has been learned about RPM in light of the practice realities brought about by COVID. He was a leader of the telehealth impact study which uncovered many insights during this period of experimentation with open effort.

From the perspective of providers, reimbursements for care were the most important issue for telehealth deployment, as the rules of payor parity for in-office vs. remote visits are temporary in response to the COVID emergency. How the final policies on payor parity are decided will have a significant impact on RPM utilization.

Patient access and familiarity with the technology in use were also a concern, as this varied widely among diverse patient populations. Integration of electronic health records (EHR) with RPM technologies and liability concerns were also ranked among those issues most salient to providers. (These findings are published in Telehealth and Medicine Today, Vol 6, Issue 3.)

The next panelist to discuss RPM technologies was Michael Carter, leader of the Continuum of Care Workstream of the IEEE SA Transforming the Telehealth Paradigm Industry Connections Activity. He is also the director of clinical IT at Mass General Brigham Hospital System. His work at Mass General has shown that RPM technologies that are connected to the Internet are more valuable among providers than those technologies that are not.

There are many touch points where the chosen technologies have to integrate effectively with the clinicians, nurses, and IT admins. Taking RPM technology as the ”last mile” to patients is widely differentiated with so many companies involved in RPM, making switching costs among different technologies enormous.

This presents a significant hurdle to technology implementation. Creating robust standards for disparate system interoperability is needed to make RPM clinically viable with streams of data coming to the physicians, taking into account the patient, the data, and the environmental context of the data collection and transmission.

The final panelist of the session was Bruce Hecht, Chair of the Transforming the Telehealth Paradigm Industry Connections Activity. With his many years of experience in the industry working with standards in the electrical engineering space, Bruce informed the audience of the importance of standards and continuing to evolve standards as technology innovation marches forward.

Examples of standards already developed include the IEEE 802.15™ series for personal area networks, with IEEE 802.15.6 being the specific standard for wireless body area networks (WBAN). More recent standards developed include those for biomarker total sleep time, so that all participants in the ecosystem implement the same definition of total sleep time in their systems.