Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Giving patients remote access

Patient remote monitoring is a feature you might want to install if your patients want to share their home monitoring info (blood pressure, blood glucose readings) with you. Patients can use digitally connected medical diagnostic devices to report data to their doctors from the comfort of their home.

Remote access is an especially functional addition to your EHR for several reasons, the biggest of which is that it allows you to keep track of vital data without dragging patients into the office on a regular basis or requiring them to keep cumbersome paper records of their numbers. For example, a patient can use a portable electrocardiogram (ECG) to monitor his heart rate throughout the day. The ECG automatically reports this data to the EHR site, and the patient record populates. Then when the physician checks the numbers that evening in his or her living room, the data is there. And no one had to leave home.

You can use remote monitoring to manage just about any type of regularly reported self-care. You could provide remote monitoring for the purposes of communicating physiologic measurements (weight, blood pressure, heart rate and rhythm, pulse oximetry, glucose), diagnostic measurements (transthoracic impedance), device information (medication pumps, electronic pillboxes, infusion devices, ADL biosensors, pedometers), and daily measurements (sleep actigraphy), to name a few.

Consider how to implement the workflows for remote patient monitoring. MDs ...