Many patients with chronic illnesses manage their health largely on their own, receiving feedback from doctors only at periodic check-in appointments. With limited guidance, patients may develop health complications, sometimes requiring hospitalization. But a new collaboration between GE Healthcare and AMC Health will enable more doctors to monitor patients’ health remotely between office visits. When problems arise, clinicians can catch them quickly, leading to fewer emergency department visits, less need for hospitalization, better patient outcomes and increased quality of life.

Almost half of all Americans — more than 133 million people — have at least one chronic illness.[i] This new collaboration will allow physicians to provide near real-time remote patient monitoring and virtual care, outside of hospital environments, to their patients. Home monitoring of biometrics for patients with chronic conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension, for example, has the potential to provide the care team with episodic data, painting a more complete picture of the patient’s condition.

The technology was created by AMC Health’s CEO and founder, Nesim Bildirici, who realized — while helping his father manage congestive heart failure — that physicians weren’t capturing ongoing health data for their patients with chronic illnesses, which made it hard for physicians to see the full picture and help improve patients’ quality of life.

“This will extend our reach beyond the hospital into the home, where we can connect with people so that clinicians can help them manage their care better,” says Ashutosh Banerjee, global general manager of diagnostic cardiology and remote patient monitoring for GE Healthcare. “This is another step forward into remote patient monitoring, or virtual care at home, for GE Healthcare.”

The new collaboration could also help healthcare providers reduce their costs and improve their efficiency, at a time when their resources are limited. It would allow physicians to help their patients stay healthier at home and could help reduce costs associated with hospital readmission. Remote monitoring could also enable patients to be discharged from the hospital earlier, freeing up beds for patients with more urgent health concerns.

“Healthcare systems are generally strained post-pandemic due to all kinds of dynamics — shortage of staff, maybe overutilization of certain parts of the hospital,” says Roshy Francis, chief technology officer of patient care solutions for GE Healthcare. “In some cases, they may also be incentivized to keep only those patients that absolutely require inpatient care in the hospital. Because of that, these kinds of effective, efficient methods to monitor patients outside of the hospital in near real time who can be monitored outside are preferable.”

Expanding the Use of Telehealth

The new collaboration will enable patients to share their health information with their providers’ offices, where it will be monitored by their care team. Providers can take action immediately if a patient’s measurements fall out of the expected range. One patient shared, “When my care manager was alerted to my symptoms, she called my cardiologist.” If the patient’s condition does not become acute, meaning they don’t need to go to the hospital for intervention, the doctors can then manage their care through remote communication. Communicating virtually is convenient for both patients and doctors: Patients don’t need to travel to appointments, and doctors cut costs while seeing more patients in less time.

Remote patient monitoring also enables providers to connect more easily with patients who have traditionally had restricted access to care. This may include patients who live in rural areas and those who have barriers to care, like frailty or transportation issues. The collaboration is expected to help improve health equity in certain communities.

“You do not even need to have the patient visit the hospital for them to get started,” says Banerjee, who notes that the care team may ship the appropriate monitoring technology to a patient before their initial telehealth appointment.

Making the Transition Simple for Providers

Because the usage of telehealth services expanded dramatically during the pandemic, many patients are comfortable meeting with their doctors this way. In recent years, the American Medical Association created additional Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes[ii] for telehealth and remote patient monitoring, enabling physicians to be reimbursed for the services more readily.

Based on a study conducted by AMC Health, the patient daily compliance rate with this technology is upwards of 80 percent,[iii] which benefits patients with chronic illness, as well as providers with value-based contracts.

“Coupling the technology with high-tech clinical interaction when it’s necessary — there’s that personal touch helping a patient feel like ‘Someone is out there watching for me,’” Bildirici says. “There are a lot of companies that deploy an app and let that drive patient behavior. It’s like going to the gym and working with the machines and trying to get better, but if you don’t have a personal trainer, you’re never going to be able to achieve the same outcome. For us, it’s really important to couple that personal touch together with the scalable technology to achieve the outcomes that we’ve been able to achieve.”

As the initiative moves forward, GE Healthcare and AMC Health ultimately aim to collaborate to integrate hospital data and home data together so that hospitals can monitor their patients post-discharge, from home, as well. This would make it simpler for doctors to manage patients’ health without needing to review a separate, independent data system.

“Over time, we plan to combine clinically relevant patient data that exists in hospital information systems, together with data collected from outside of the hospital, to generate insights that clinicians can use to make timely decisions, leveraging the complete patient context,” Francis says. “This is a difficult thing to do, but that’s what we’re exploring and we are excited about the possibilities.”

REFERENCES

[i] Spyglass Consulting Group, “Healthcare Without Bounds: Trends in Remote Patient Monitoring 2019,” October 2019.

[ii] Andis Robeznieks, “As Remote Patient Monitoring Expands, So Does CPT to Describe It,” AMA, April 15, 2022, https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/cpt/remote-patient-monitoring-expands-so-does-cpt-describe-it.

[iii] Data on file.

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