Dr Elizabeth Kwo on the Expanding Use of Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote patient monitoring includes urgent care uses, long-term monitoring to help keep patients with cancer out of the hospital by monitoring the effects of oncology treatment at home, and even voice monitoring to check for altered mental status, said Elizabeth Kwo, MD, MBA, MPH, the deputy chief clinical officer at Anthem BCBS, and a speaker at the 10th anniversary of Patient-Centered Oncology Care® (PCOC) conference.

Transcript

How can payers use remote patient monitoring to advance value-based care, particularly in oncology?

Sure, there are multiple ways right now, in terms of how payers are leveraging digital devices—they're called Internet of Things, so IoT. Remote patient monitoring can consist of whether it's something called TIDO, that there are certain devices where you can connect with a doctor, but be able to use certain devices that can show the doctor your mouth, your ear, and other ways to speak to the doctor and urgent care in the setting of your own home. There's also long-term monitoring, which is instead of in the moment of care with the doctor, you're actually getting monitored with the device. Of course, there are many things that allow that, from wearables— these are things that you can wear—from heart monitors to temperature, to look at, let's say, post discharge, where if someone's on chemotherapy, whether or not they spike a fever, or if they're dehydrated. You can also look at, let's say, electrolytes, there are ways to now monitor that remotely. There's also different ways in terms of when a patient is asking for questions. There are all these things right now called voice biomarkers, where people are listening into how the person is doing, whether or not they may have signs of, let's say, delirium or dementia in the home, just looking at speech patterns. So there is a lot right now that's moving ahead within the ecosystem of the health care space.