Diabetes affects 34 million Americans, roughly 10 percent of the American population. With 1 in 7 healthcare dollars spent totaling $327 billion, diabetes represents a significant economic and healthcare burden. Fortunately, Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is an opportunity for endocrinologists to help these populations.
While a complex regimen of treatments range from diet, exercise, pills, to injections, checking levels of blood sugar is essential to understanding the state of the disease. The complications of diabetes range from the leading cause of blindness, kidney failure and nontraumatic lower limb amputations. Poor management of blood sugar leads to $7.4 billion in potentially preventable admissions.
In a traditional diabetes management program, patients must manually journal their blood glucose measurements. They must then wait until they have an in-person appointment with their provider, then read off handwritten readings from a piece of. After that lengthy process, they are then able to make medication adjustments.
Remote patient monitoring provides an opportunity to bring the management of diabetes to the modern era. Using connected medical devices that can wirelessly transmit blood glucose readings, patients, families, providers can help patients through acute life-threatening incidents and overall long-term management of the disease.
In a modern workflow, as patients check their blood glucose levels, clinical staff can be alerted to abnormally high or low readings and check-in on the patient to avoid preventable poor outcomes, ED visits, and hospitalizations.
Additionally, Remote patient monitoring empowers providers to be able to adjust medications through telehealth visits. Both patients and their providers better visualize and understand blood sugar control trends and can proactively prevent devastating long-term complications of the disease.
The A1c test is used to diagnose diabetes. A measurement of 5.7-6.4% indicates prediabetes, while a measurement of 6.5% or greater indicates diabetes.
The NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information reports that in some preliminary studies of Remote patient monitoring, patients have shown improvement in the management of diabetes. In particular, they observed decreases of A1c levels in patients using RPM.
Our easy-to-use system is designed to support improved clinical outcomes and to be highly profitable with minimal upfront risk. Simply request a demo to learn how Optimize Health can help you establish an RPM program.