Butting up against that reality are the expenses of providing that care. With severe strains on traditional sources of funding such as Medicare and Social Security, incentives are strong to minimize visits to clinics and hospitals. Preventative medicine is a given, and remote care instead of in-person visits is even better in terms of cost-containment.
Enter tech solutions.
- Rather than going to a clinic and getting weighed, say, once a month, a senior can use a digital scale daily that saves and transmits results wirelessly – not only saving money, but providing more regular and comprehensive results.
- Instead of a nurse checking blood pressure, a home device can do the job and pass along records just as the scale does.
- Heart-rate records can be tracked not only throughout the day, but moment to moment with wearables.
- Wearables can also track movement, giving an indication how active a patient is.
- Sleep patterns, too, are trackable, letting providers know if the patient is indeed sleeping well or instead is sleeping fitfully.
- Glucose levels are also easily monitored and shared with those concerned about, say, a diabetic’s insulin tolerance.
Those are all present-day options for monitoring a patient’s health remotely, and more is to come.
All of that information can be sent to a central location, entered into the patient’s EMR and retrieved when needed to see if treatment is needed or the patient is doing fine. Patients, too, can see their health status and take precautions before their providers remind them to do so.
The critical feature of all these devices: They eliminate manual entry that previously was time-consuming and often inaccurate. The senior doesn’t have to write down what the scale, glucose meter or blood-pressure monitor said – the devices do it for her. With gamification incentives and other reasons to check their own results, seniors become more invested in maintaining the healthy practices that will keep them out of hospitals.
In the past, companies may have thought that the only modification they needed to make for seniors was to make the font size and buttons bigger. (That was enough to propel the sales a cellphone with jumbo keys and little more.) Manufacturers are starting to realize that’s not quite enough.
About Orb Health
Care Management as a Service™ rapidly provides EMR-connected remote contact centers as a scalable virtual extension of the practice to deliver cross-practice scheduling and care management programs as a guided service without adding staff, apps, or infrastructure.
