Creating RPM Success by Designing Superb Support

For a Superb RPM Support System the various processes in each stage need to be defined – from the Happy Day Scenario (what will happen 80% of the time) to alternate or exception scenarios that cover the various anticipated and projected variations.

User-Friendly Technology Is Critical

While workflows can be used to compensate for cumbersome technology, it is so much easier to create a great experience for patients, clinicians, and the monitoring team when the technology is user-friendly, intuitive to use, and reliable in its performance.

As I laid out in an article on Selecting the Best Vendors for your RPM Program, the key to selecting the right technology is to become a well educated, informed buyer by first defining the workflows and the desired user experience before going shopping.

When evaluating “ease of use”, here are six questions you should ask when evaluating RPM solutions:

“How easy is it…

1. … for patients to connect the monitoring devices to “the cloud”?
2. …for patients to take and transmit measurements?”
3. …for the monitoring staff to see which patients need attention — and why?“
4. …for clinicians to quickly review a patients’ historical data?”
5. …for the monitoring staff to track the time spent on each patient?”
6. …for the billing team to create charges from the data?”

But Ultimately It’s About the People

Nothing works in healthcare without people (and AI is not going to replace people anytime soon). Everything we do in healthcare is about people, especially for patients, our whole “raison d’être”

On the one side, part of the “receiving end” of our Superb RPM Support System are the patients, the monitoring staff, and the clinicians. On the other side are the people providing support.

So what kind of support do we need?

Well, first off there is support in the form of training. Training on the technology and training on the workflows. And training on how to get support. There’s training for clinicians, training for patients, and training for the monitoring staff. There may even be training for new support staff.

Also remember that training is ongoing, beyond the first round of training. New clinicians or monitoring staff need to be trained. Clinicians may need to be trained if they haven’t had an RPM client in a while. Patients will of course be trained when they first start. But maybe they have a hospital stay — and then may have to be retrained on how to best use the monitoring devices.

Next on the list of responsibilities for the RPM Support Staff is the ongoing operational and technical support. Most often this means providing just-in-time assistance with problems encountered by patients, by the monitoring team, or by the clinician.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, the RPM Support Staff should also periodically engage in systematic troubleshooting of problems that occur repeatedly which could be the result of technical problems, the result of poorly defined workflows, or the result of insufficient training. This analysis should result in updating workflows, updating the training, and potentially even updating the technology.

Laying the Groundwork for RPM Success

RPM Success is never an accident. It is the result of conscious decisions to define effective and efficient workflows, select a suitable technology solution, provide proper training, and offer ongoing, easily accessible just-in-time support.

Two key ingredients for getting people to embrace change are to provide “Knowledge” and to create the “Ability” to do “their job” well. A Superb Support System does exactly that. It provides Ability through well-defined workflows and user-friendly, intuitive to use technology and Knowledge through training and just-in-time support.

Look for the next article in the series where I’ll be focusing on getting the clinician buy in to achieve the ultimate holy grail of RPM success: Patient Engagement.

What does your Superb RPM Support System encompass? Would you like to share it at one of our upcoming monthly Telehealth T-Time: A Community for Telehealth Enthusiasts meetings? Reach out to me anytime!