Spike in Remote Patient Monitoring During Pandemic Is Driven by a Fraction of Providers

Featured Infographic   Spike in Remote Patient Monitoring During Pandemic Is Driven by a Fraction of Providers   Billing for remote patient monitoring (RPM) jumped by more than four times during the first year of the pandemic, according to a recent Health Affairs study. The increase was mostly driven by a handful of primary care providers. Using medical claims data from the OptumLabs Data Warehouse collected between Jan. 1, 2019 to March 31, 2021, the researchers found that there were 19,762 general RPM claims in March 2021, compared with 4,355 claims in February 2020. Continuous glucose monitoring, however, only saw a slight increase over the same period of time. In addition, RPM claims were highly concentrated. The top 0.1% of primary care providers — identified by the researchers as “high-volume provider group” — accounted for 69% of all general RPM claims.   Patients with hypertension or diabetes were more likely to start general RPM. Among the 8,481 patients with diabetes or hypertension who saw a high-volume primary care provider in 2019, 21.5% had a general RPM claim in 2020. There were no significant differences in RPM use based on condition complexity, number of conditions or diabetes control.

NOTES: Claims can be assigned to both monitoring groups, although this is rare. Volumes are aggregated by month and indexed to February 2020. Use rate refers to the percent of patients in a given segment that had at least one general remote patient monitoring claim in 2020.   SOURCE: “Rapid Growth Of Remote Patient Monitoring Is Driven By A Small Number Of Primary Care Providers,” Health Affairs. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2021.02026 HEALTH AFFAIRS 41, NO. 9 (2022): 1248–1254.   From Health Plan Weekly Learn more about subscribing to AIS Health's publications.