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The Evolution of Remote Monitoring in Support of Digital Health
The first in a series of articles exploring how interoperability of cardiac monitoring platforms in digital health brings value to patients, practices, and populations.
Improving Device Patient Management
Remote monitoring has evolved into a standard of care for the management of cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIED). This virtual connection between device patients and their providers promotes quality of care, quality outcomes, clinical and operational efficiencies, and patient experience. Remote monitoring has facilitated the management of increasing numbers of device patients while improving clinical outcomes over in-person-only device management. It supports disease management strategies, mortality and morbidity reductions, and reduction of healthcare utilization along with associated costs. However, remote monitoring advantages go beyond device patient management. These benefits are tied to CIED data capture and the ability to utilize it in conjunction with the electronic health record (EHR) to advance patient care.
The Founding of PaceMate™
PaceMate™, founded in 2015 by cardiac rhythm management industry professionals, realized early the importance of remote monitoring for patients and healthcare professionals. Sensitive to the value of the device data, PaceMate™ also recognized caveats to successful remote monitoring programs: Patients often require assistance to engage in remote monitoring; they need help with setup, troubleshooting remote monitoring equipment in the home, and understanding the importance of remote monitoring.
During its humble beginnings with an initial group of 150 patients, PaceMate™ founders visited patients’ homes to teach patients and help get them started. PaceMate™ also noted that many cardiology practices had limited resources and/or staff with CIED management expertise to execute a successful program. The sheer amount of device data that inundated practices daily and the time needed to support patients’ participation in remote monitoring were overwhelming.
Best-in-Class Remote Monitoring Software
To address this emerging health data problem, the PaceMate™ team developed innovative technology to streamline the device clinic, improve workflow, reduce medical errors, and take better care of patients. Today, PaceMate™LIVE is a best-in-class, cloud-native software for cardiac device (CIED) management. Device-generated data automatically uploads to PaceMate™’s vendor-neutral platform for immediate review—reporting clinically actionable alerts with bidirectional EHR integration through custom-built HL7® FHIR® APIs and HL7® webservices standard for the exchange of health information.
Efficiency, Integration, and Interoperability
In addition, PaceMate™’s ability to integrate with multiple ambulatory cardiac monitoring device types, including consumer-driven wearables, promotes clinician efficiency by housing all data—CIED remote and in-person, heart failure, and external cardiac monitoring data—on just one platform.
The foundation for these efficiencies lives within PaceMate™’s cloud-native, vendor-neutral platform. Yet, the major benefits to patients and clinics exist in PaceMate™LIVE’s capability to aggregate data from multiple sources and associate cardiac data with EHR data. As a digital health solution, PaceMate™LIVE informs clinical decision-making and supports research initiatives for health outcome improvements at the patient, clinic, and population levels.
The overarching benefits of digital health translate to efficiency improvements and, more importantly, improvements in health outcomes. Specifically, digital health offerings improve clinical and operational efficiencies, quality, patient safety through reduction of medical errors, and access to care while reducing the economic burden of healthcare.
The key to successful digital initiatives exists in the level of interoperability digital health tools provide as well as the ability to seamlessly integrate with electronic health records (EHRs) for the exchange of health information. The real-time exchange of health information between systems supports real-time clinical decision-making, assessment of quality measures, and a person-centered approach to healthcare.
Without robust interoperability, the advantages of digital health are significantly limited. Many health systems, hospitals, and clinics lack the infrastructure and resources to facilitate the level of interoperability needed not only to support healthcare value, but also to meet federal policy mandates established over the past decade. PaceMate™ is a scalable solution due to its place in major EHR marketplaces, coupled with its true, automated bidirectional exchange of data via the HL7® FHIR® API's and HL7® webservices standard.
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This article is published with support from PaceMate™.
