1SRCE is a new remote patient management solution being developed by the company illumisoft. The platform is designed to help physicians and researchers monitor patient outcomes by tracking the data recorded by personal health devices like weight scales, blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, and blood glucose monitors. The data collected by these devices is useful to healthcare workers because it gives them reliable information about how a patient is responding to new treatments or therapies in between their in-person visits. This is particularly important in rural areas, where patients may face many barriers that prevent them from regularly visiting with their physician. Health monitoring is also beneficial for patients who suffer from chronic conditions, and who need a management tool to help them keep their condition under control.
While an increasing number of tools are becoming available to help patients monitor their health at home, realizing the potential of remote patient monitoring requires researchers and physicians to have the ability to bring together all of this data about their patients and organize it in a way that lets them track health outcomes. 1SRCE is being developed as a solution to this problem. Currently, the platform is in an early stage of development with many features still under construction, but the core function of the service is to give physicians, researchers, and health system administrators a dashboard for tracking patients’ remote data and managing the associated billing. This dashboard can flag patients whose readings have exceeded the threshold set by physicians, or who have not submitted readings in more than a day. Physicians are also able to use the platform to access a patient’s insurance information, current medications, vitals charts, and more. In the future, illumisoft is considering adding a patient portal so that patients can also see the data being sent to their physician, and intends to expand the platform so it can integrate into existing EMR and EHR systems.
As part of her presentation of 1SRCE to the Health Innovation Team, presenter Alicia Mullins also solicited feedback from the team about current challenges in remote patient monitoring, and the features that health workers would want to see in a remote patient monitoring solution. One challenge noted by the team is that it is difficult to reliably record the time physicians spend on remote patient monitoring. Medicare and Medicaid require health providers to document engagement in 20-minute increments. Given the range of providers involved and the diversity of communications tools used to remotely engage with patients, some HIT members reported losing as much as $100/month on patients due to missed billing. Further, one requirement for reimbursement is that patients take at least 16 readings with the devices that have been prescribed for them. University Health has found that patients often stop taking measurements once they perceive that their conditions are under control, leading many patients to miss this threshold. These challenges in seeking reimbursement have made it more difficult for health systems to justify the expense of undertaking remote patient monitoring, and solving them could represent an important contribution towards making remote patient monitoring a more widespread practice.
Alicia Mullins, Client Results Executive at illumisoft, presented to the KC Digital Drive Health Innovation Team on July 27, 2022. A recording of her presentation can be accessed here.