Why You Should Expect More than Customer Service from Your RPM Provider

Great remote patient monitoring (RPM) programs don’t just happen, even with the best software and technology. The Client Success team at your RPM partner will be critical to helping you launch, maintain, and grow your program. Most companies will provide basic customer service to reactively answer questions, troubleshoot the software, and help you order devices. But true Client Success is fundamentally different from customer service or customer support.

Here are the 6 capabilities you should expect from a competent RPM Client Success team.

1. A Success Plan Before You Sign

Your RPM partner should be providing client success resources to your team throughout the sales process. Great RPM programs always start with a detailed plan— not just a sales contract. Before you sign, your RPM partner should be helping you create an RPM game plan that outlines your goals, approach, timeline, roles and responsibilities, and more. This blueprint ensures that you and your RPM partner have defined success and are all driving towards it from Day 1.

2. Implementation Resources

Your RPM partner should have implementation-specific experts that provide hands-on training and coaching, in-person or virtually. This will ensure that your RPM devices are successfully deployed and don’t end up sitting on a shelf.

Training isn’t just about teaching your staff to use the software. It should also include how to talk to patients about RPM, how to identify RPM-eligible patients, how to create RPM processes that work for your office, best practices for onboarding patients, and more.

3. Onboarding Events

How long should it take to onboard your first 20 – 50 patients? For some practices, it’s months or never. A strong implementation and client success team can get you there in a day with a well-planned and executed RPM onboarding event. An onboarding event consists of scheduling RPM-specific appointments across one or more days with staff and rooms dedicated exclusively for RPM on those days.

An onboarding event not only quickly ramps your program, but also provides a great opportunity for your staff to learn all things RPM. After a day or two of back-to-back onboarding appointments with expert coaching, your team will be confident in their RPM approach and ready to continue adding RPM patients to the program.

4. A Plan for Patient Churn

Patients will leave your RPM program. Some of this patient turnover is good—patients will meet their health goals and no longer need RPM. Inevitably, even with the best monitoring outreach, some patients will not adhere to regular readings and will need to return their devices. This means that even after onboarding the patients you initially identified as RPM-eligible, your program could start shrinking.

For many medical groups and practices, the financial reimbursement from RPM can make a huge difference in supporting their staff and covering rising practice costs. So having a plan to maintain or grow the RPM patient base is critical.

Your RPM client success team should work with you to plan for patient churn. They can help you identify and onboard new patients that will enable you to maintain or grow your RPM program, depending on your goals. This could include expanding the conditions that you use RPM for or including patients with RPM coverage from commercial insurance.

5. Regular Business Reviews

A strong client success team proactively shares data with you before you have questions or concerns. They are regularly scheduling business reviews to look at your RPM patient growth as well as patient engagement metrics. They understand both the clinical and financial impact of RPM and can provide insights into how your RPM program is doing relative to similar practices. And most importantly, they continuously identify and communicate improvement opportunities. This is true client success versus customer support.

6. Understanding the Bigger Picture

Finally, a strong client success team understands that RPM is just one piece of what you offer to patients. And it may not always be your number one priority. As your RPM program evolves and your staffing resources change, you may need more support or different workflows. Your client success manager should be able to assess your program and make recommendations on if and when outsourcing remote monitoring, using a remote onboarding service, or integrating with your EHR might make sense.

Is Your RPM Provider Delivering Value?

If your RPM program is struggling to grow or you are considering launching one, you can set up a free consultation with one of RPM experts. We are happy to share more about what you should expect from your client success and implementation resources or answer general RPM questions.