Imagine your phone going off, but instead of Facebook, it’s your healthcare app. It’s telling you that your blood pressure is looking a little high, and there’s a timeslot available tomorrow with your doctor in case you want it checked out.
Many different industries have been transformed by the power of real-time data. Banks for example can use real-time data to process transactions instantly. The retail industry is thriving online, using real-time sales information to ship goods quickly and keep an accurate measure of stock.
Healthcare happens in real-time too and as the industry becomes further empowered by digital technology, a growing number of healthcare management systems are pushing out event-driven, real-time data feeds. Healthcare facilities looking to provide more proactive care to their patients and a better working environment for staff can benefit immensely from innovations such as this.
One of the more relatable advancements that has come from the advent of real-time data streams is the development of healthcare ‘notifications’ or ‘alerts’, just like your favourite social media platform. This proactive feature allows clinicians to subscribe to the event stream of a patient or group of patients.
Subscribers can be notified, in a similar manner to what you’d experience on Facebook, whenever key events take place throughout a patient’s healthcare cycle. Alerts can also be configured by the clinicians to focus on specific, and relevant, events such as receiving lab results, admission to the emergency department or a patient discharge from hospital.
This data revolution will have significant impact outside of conventional clinical settings, allowing clinicians to monitor a patient’s health while they’re at home or in the workplace through remote patient monitoring. RPM allows robust data collection from medical devices, free of the time and financial constraints of clinical settings, and helps to build complete and accurate health records
In an ongoing study, the University of Pittsburgh Medical centre sent devices to over 600 patients who were suffering from congestive heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure. These devices measured blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs. The collected data was then transmitted back to the University and resulted in a 74% decrease in hospital admissions, among the test group, within the first year.
As the price of monitoring falls and accessibility to it increases, the scope of RPM technology will broaden to include other observable health factors such as patient weight change, blood pressure levels, and changes in blood sugar.
These progressions, coupled with the changes to the US healthcare system, including the move from fee-for-service models to fee-for-performance, will further shift healthcare towards RPM – increasing the standard of care, diagnosis accuracy, and, ultimately, driving down overall healthcare costs.
To learn more about managing real-time healthcare data, download the white paper now!
