Remote patient monitoring taking off as hospitals look to empower patients, cut costs

Hospital admissions plummeted at Vidant Health-operated facilities after it started remotely monitoring patients suffering from heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure. Patients at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center send doctors pictures of their wounds from offsite in order to find out if they need antibiotics. And a patient at the hospital had his blood-pressure medication adjusted after he wirelessly sent the doctors biometrics from his home.

Such stories, which were just chronicled in The Wall Street Journal, are becoming increasingly common. Remote monitoring can empower patients and lead to more fine-tuning of care while saving hospitals money and helping hospitals meet their Affordable Care Act (ACA) goals, like reducing hospitals readmissions (or else facing a reduction in Medicare reimbursement).

Sales of remote-monitoring devices are expected to top $32 billion this year, according to Market Research Group, and will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 9.2% between 2014 and 2019.

St. Jude Medical's ($STJ) 2014 purchase of CardioMEMS for $375 million is a sign of the growing interesting in the patient-monitoring arena. The CardioMEMS HF system is a dime-sized sensor implanted in the heart that patients can use to remotely monitor pressure in the pulmonary artery. Then they send the information to a website that is checked by their doctor, who can use the data to adjust medication and refine medical care. St. Jude says CardioMEMS reduces hospital admissions by 37%, and the company touts the device as a way to help hospitals meet those ACA targets.

Creating the connectivity infrastructure to enable and manage information sharing between the hospital and home, or even within the hospital itself, is another business opportunity. Philips' ($PHG) recent restructuring of its healthcare unit is aimed at focusing the company more closely on healthcare informatics, delivered via central monitoring systems like its IntelliVue Information Center. Informatics last made up less than 10% of the company's revenue.

And Welch Allyn partnered with software company Spok last week to connect its vital-signs monitors to the mobile devices of healthcare practitioners in order to better prioritize and not overwhelm staff with device-related alarms. The partnership is part of the company's Connex Clinical Surveillance System, an enterprise approach to data management that allows practitioners to monitor patient status continuously and manage alerts on the basis of an individual bed or an entire floor in order to mitigate the number of alarms.

The advent of remote patient monitoring has its challenges, including a tight reimbursement environment. In addition, the appropriate bounds of home healthcare are often debated. Many are wary of mobile imaging devices that enable X-rays to be conducted at home. Homemade medical devices and data-sharing systems--like Nightscout, an open-source, do-it-yourself project to enable remote monitoring of blood glucose levels in diabetes patients--pose a regulatory challenge to the FDA.

Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, Penny Lee, a nurse at Mercy health system in Missouri, makes 20 patient calls a day based on warnings from remote patient monitors, like sudden weight gain, a sign of congestive heart failure.