Remote patient monitoring, or telemonitoring, is a rapidly developing area of medical technology. Telemonitoring is, basically, the use of technology to monitor patients from a distance. Versions of the technology are already extensively used in hospitals and clinics. We also see it on ambulances connected to receiving hospitals. The ability to continually track a patient allows providers to identify a patient’s deterioration in real time – so as to give providers the opportunity to timely intervene. It also allows for more efficient transfer of care, as receiving providers can keep an eye on a patient’s condition en route. Telemonitoring also holds promise in monitoring folks for significant disease where inpatient monitoring is simply not warranted. Given the proliferation of wearable medical technology, is telemonitoring in your future? If you have, or will in the future suffer from, a chronic disease like heart failure, cardiopulmonary disease, diabetes, or asthma, it may well be.

For one thing, telemonitoring allows providers to monitor a patient’s telemetry around the clock. That is, if the glucose of a diabetic patient drops, the patient and provider may be alerted so as to advise the patient on how to respond. Similarly, abnormalities in vital signs may trigger a warning that a patient’s congestive heart failure needs immediate intervention, and the provider could dispatch an ambulance to treat or transfer the patient to a higher level of care.

Many of us already do some sort of voluntary telemonitoring, in the form of wearing an Apple Watch or Fitbit. While the monitoring on those devices does remain, for now, primarily for use by the wearer (and the anonymized data is used by the device manufacturer) the accuracy and sensitivity of these devices continues to improve as the technology progresses. And providers will rely more and more on such devices.