Optimize Health explores how in-person and remote care work together to produce better patient outcomes, revenue results, and patient engagement.
By Todd Haedrich, CEO at Optimize Health
For years, the in-person office visit was the default healthcare delivery model, and for good reason. As humans, we are wired to connect. Research shows that our connections with other people can reduce stress, improve our physical and mental health, and boost our general sense of well-being.
And for decades, the in-person model was successful. Patients developed direct relationships with their doctor and the primary care physician, and recurring office visits were born. Under this model, patients were seen in-office for routine or critical issues alike and this was their first (and often only) action taken. But over time and for a number of reasons, the in-person model became untenable to maintain.
First, the rise of adults with chronic conditions has risen exponentially, and this has only accelerated in the last decade. Today an estimated 133 million Americans, or nearly half the country’s population, have one chronic condition, such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more. This is 15 million more people with chronic conditions than just 10 years ago, and in another 10 years, this figure is expected to jump to 170M Americans. Concurrently, the number of adults with two or more chronic conditions is projected to be 68M adults, or more than 27% of the American adult population.
For physicians and their clinical teams, caring for and supporting these patients costs a tremendous amount of time and resources. For the United States, the cost of treating chronic conditions comprises $4.1T of the country’s healthcare spend each year.
Here’s an example of how this works: people with chronic conditions comprise 90% of all prescription drug needs. From our work at Optimize Health, we hear from physicians that just prescribing and maintaining those prescriptions takes a lot of time. They first see patients in-office to determine the issue(s) and, if it can or should be treated with medication based on relevant health history. They then have to check it against any other current medications and comorbidities. Once prescribed, they spend considerable time just maintaining the prescription over the patient’s condition, which is typically ever present because you can’t cure heart disease or diabetes. Even with just the seemingly simple act of prescription maintenance, doctors are spending time during the day that doesn’t include the time needed to see patients who struggle to manage their chronic conditions and need high-touch, ongoing support given their high rates of hospital admissions and emergency room visits.
Second, the in-person model relies on proximity and a time-commitment that is untenable for patients. More than 121M Americans live in healthcare deserts, having to travel at least 30 minutes or more to their nearest hospital. In addition, more than 9% of counties in the U.S. lack adequate access to healthcare, where the ratio of patients to providers is approximately 10,500 to 1, which is 3x higher than the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recommendation. These deserts are located in predominantly rural and lower income areas, where the cost of traveling to receive in-person care boils down to people who have to take unpaid time away from work to travel 30+ minutes to an office visit, get roughly 18 minutes of face-to-face time with their doctor, and then take another 30+ minutes to get home. In actuality, Harvard Medical School research shows the total time spent door-to-door is as much as two hours per visit.
With a ROI of 7 minutes of travel for 1 minute of care, is it any surprise that the patient no-show rate is as high as 80%, particularly for those who have lower incomes and travel longer distances to receive care?
The fact is, we have known for some time that relying on the in-person model alone isn’t working. The time needed to treat patients with chronic conditions that are stable requires an extra 2,850 hours more per year from physicians, or approximately 10.6 more hours per day. Let’s face it: we have been trying to solve an ever-accelerating healthcare numbers problem with a solution that cannot meet the challenge on its own.
We can’t add more hours to the day, but what we can do is give providers and their care teams the ability to use the minutes outside of office visits to provide care. At Optimize Health, we believe that remote care is the missing piece to improving healthcare delivery as a whole because it gives providers the ability to use data to proactively support patients and understand how they’re managing their health in between each in-office visit. While Optimize Health is known as a premier provider of RPM solutions and services, we see RPM as just one pillar that supports the larger remote care landscape. Other programmatic pillars include chronic care management (CCM), principal care management (PCM), remote therapeutic management (RTM), and others that fill out the remote care umbrella.
In this sense, we see remote care and office visits as working together to catalyze a flywheel of improved outcomes that deepen the patient-provider relationship because they are able to stay connected throughout the year.
In this two-pronged approach to patient care that blends in-person with remote care, those thousands of minutes available to providers that exist outside of the office visit and that have been left on the table are usable to treat those who need consistent, daily care. Providers use remote care to connect the dots between those three, maybe four visits per year and deliver care and support to patients during their daily activities without disrupting their work or personal schedules.
I recently had the opportunity to talk to one of our clients, Dr. Aamir Iqbal who owns a private practice in the greater Los Angeles, CA area. He says that using remote care and programs like RPM and CCM augments his ability to deliver better in-person care. “In this day and age, data is everything, and remote care solutions arm the provider with the information to understand what’s happening when patients aren’t around and stay updated with their needs. I no longer need to work through lunch or after hours because I don’t know what’s happened since I last saw the patient six months ago, but am now using this real-time data to provide preventative care and prevent a trip to ER or to the hospital.”
In our vision for the healthcare industry, the office visit and remote care work in tandem to improve patient outcomes, faster. Patients continue to see providers in-office because they both benefit from face-to-face contact, and then leverage solutions like Optimize Health’s remote care platform and managed services to transition from reactive, periodic care to preventative and proactive care.
From the patient’s perspective, we are delivering technology that is adapting to their needs and lives. People with chronic conditions can conveniently receive care each day without interrupting their lives. In this way, we see remote care as a catalyst in helping to close gaps in health disparities, particularly for people with disabilities who are less able to travel, and those who live in rural areas and/or underserved areas.
We hear from our Optimize Health clinical team that patients love knowing that their doctor is taking care of them even when they’re not in office. Dr. Iqbal also notes that his patients who are enrolled in remote care at this practice are more engaged because they are no longer “out of sight, out of mind”, and best of all, their health literacy has improved because the information is there for them to see.
Blending remote care with in-person care visits will save more lives, period. Our remote care platform helps providers deliver care the way that patients truly experience it: cycling in and out of chronic or acute care needs depending on their adherence, support networks, and health histories. At the same time, we are helping patients and providers forge deeper bonds by staying more connected and spending more time together, not less. In this way, we are expediting the quality and quantity of patient-provider interactions and helping to reduce the number of critical events outside the four walls of the practice.
Optimize Health is unifying the continuum of care that takes place in office and at home across all patients, all care types, and all statuses. It’s time we use technology to make better outcomes possible for anyone, anywhere.
Optimize Health is a leading provider of remote care solutions and services that allows providers to provide care to patients and stay connected outside of office visits. Learn more>>
Join us at the HealthTechX Summit in London on 23rd February to hear Todd Haedrich’s perspectives on ‘How Remote Monitoring Drives Real World Evidence Generation’. See the full agenda here.
