According to a recent MarketsAndMarkets report, the global home healthcare market is poised to surge from a value of $227.5 billion in 2015 to $349.8 billion in 2020. According to report analysts, a number of factors are driving this immense growth—a rising geriatric population across the globe, the need for cost-effective healthcare delivery due to increasing healthcare costs, rising incidences of chronic diseases and technological advances in medical devices.
With these unique circumstances converging simultaneously, it should come as no surprise that the home healthcare industry is booming. But despite the gains being made in the home healthcare market, organizations within the industry are now facing a new host of challenges as they seek to adapt.
Home healthcare organizations face logistics crisis
Though it could have taken your employees a decade to obtain their doctoral degrees, that doesn’t mean these highly-skilled employees have the experience or expertise to manage the back-end logistical challenges associated with remote patient monitoring. Nonetheless, the surging demand for home healthcare solutions has put healthcare administrators in the position of having to ship, recover, sanitize, redeploy and provide support for home health monitoring devices. Maintaining that responsibility internally can potentially put an extraordinary burden on your staff that results in diminished patient care.
Compliance becomes a two-fold issue
When it comes to home healthcare, there are two types of compliance that must be addressed in the current state of the industry. Connected medical devices, and the data they transmit, are considered personally identifiable information, and steps must be taken to ensure that the information is not able to be accessed by unauthorized parties. Maintaining compliance with HIPAA and other standards requires informed personnel that can manage any IT challenges that arise with home health monitoring devices.
The other form of compliance has to do with patients themselves. Ensuring that a patient is compliant with a medication schedule can be more difficult in a home healthcare environment. This has led home healthcare practitioners to seek remote patient monitoring systems that can send alerts to patients or providers when medications have not been properly dispensed.
Improving your Remote Patient Monitoring program with emerging features
For existing home healthcare organizations, it can be challenging to adopt emerging solutions and integrate them into their current RPM programs. Too stuck in their proven methods, the idea of incorporating data analytics and reporting may sound like a sound idea, however difficult to deploy. This is even more difficult for healthcare organizations just entering the market looking to launch an entirely new program. The one-size-fits-all model certainly does not apply to home healthcare, and in order to truly improve patient outcomes, it has become necessary to find home healthcare service providers that are able to tailor a customized telehealth system that maximizes your company’s potential.
While the booming home healthcare business has certainly given rise to a host of new challenges for healthcare practitioners, Trapollo is ready to help you face them head on. To learn more about how Trapollo’s telehealth support services can help your organization stand out in a historically competitive and complex market, click here.