Remote patient monitoring enables healthcare professionals to have long-distance contact with their patients, while keeping their health in check. The patients don’t need to come to the healthcare facility if they just want to know the current status of their health or have a health consultation session with their doctor. However, despite the conveniences it brings, remote patient monitoring also has its own challenges. Here are 5 challenges in monitoring your patients remotely:
- Problems During Online Video Communications
One common challenge in remote patient monitoring is the video communication session. Sometimes, it will not run as smoothly as you might expect. During video communications, quite a lot of data gets transferred, and sometimes, problems might arise when you establish a video communication with your patient. Your video communication sessions can get disrupted by various aspects, such as problems with the network you are using, problems with the device you or your patients are using, problems with the telehealth app, and many other possibilities.
Important video communication sessions between the patient and the healthcare professionals can get interrupted, which might create an unpleasant experience for the patient when they use the remote patient monitoring service.
- Problems with Understanding the Telehealth Technology for Older Patients
For the patients that belong to the millennial generation, they might be well-versed in the current technology, and there will be no problem for them to use remote patient monitoring and other telehealth services. However, for older patients, such as the patients that are in their 60s or 70s, it might be difficult for them to figure out how to use the telehealth technology and follow the remote patient monitoring procedure.
This is another challenge that healthcare professionals need to deal with. They need to educate older patients about how to use the remote patient monitoring technology and how to request immediate help when they need it.
- Adapting to the Remote Patient Monitoring Technology
Remote patient monitoring is one of the technological advancements in the medical field that more and more healthcare facilities are using to provide better healthcare services for their patients. However, because it’s still quite new, many people are still not familiar with the use of remote patient monitoring. Even for the healthcare professionals and nursing staff, they still need some time to adapt to this new technology, so they can provide better healthcare services for their patients.
It’s the same for the patients. Many patients are still not familiar with remote patient monitoring, and many of them might have difficulty using this technology. It is the reason for healthcare facilities to provide education both for the healthcare professionals and the patients about how to use this technology and how they can benefit from it.
- Establishing Contact with Patients in Remote Areas
One purpose of remote patient monitoring is to enable healthcare facilities to provide healthcare services for long-distance patients. However, there is often the challenge of dealing with the patients in remote areas. Some areas might not be within the reach of the remote patient monitoring service because they are too far out of reach. It might be difficult for the healthcare professionals to reach certain remote areas and even establish video communications with their patients there.
Establishing contact with patients in remote areas might be difficult for the healthcare facilities unless they have a nearby facility in the remote area. Also, the area needs to have a strong network connection to establish video communications with no issues.
- Outdated Medical Equipment
Another challenge that healthcare facilities might face with remote patient monitoring is the outdated medical equipment. Remote patient monitoring is an advanced technology that keeps on growing, and it gets updated from time to time with new software and new medical equipment. New medical equipment is also getting released for remote patient monitoring as often as once per year, allowing the healthcare professionals to check more aspects of the patient’s health and expand their remote patient monitoring service.
Sometimes, you will need the latest medical equipment to conduct the best remote monitoring session for certain patients. It will be a problem if you can’t provide the latest equipment to do this, so you might end up lowering the patient’s experience with your healthcare services. So, it’s important for healthcare facilities to keep on updating their medical equipment to keep up with the latest technology in remote patient monitoring.
Conclusion
These are the challenges you might face when monitoring patients remotely. Yes, it might provide plenty of conveniences both for the patients and for the healthcare professionals. However, the long-distance nature of remote patient monitoring might also give certain drawbacks both for the healthcare professionals and the patients. It’s important for the healthcare facility to minimize the challenges they face in their remote patient monitoring sessions by providing education and improving various aspects of their telehealth infrastructure.
