Clinical Research

There are opportunities for clinics to harness the benefits of remote while solving for the challenges that stem from an overwhelming volume of transmissions. The authors propose three areas of improvement: advanced technology with simple dashboards, industry data standardization, and reimbursement policy changes.

Three major themes emerged regarding the biggest challenges in managing patients with remote monitoring: patient connectivity, the volume of transmissions, and staffing. Strategies for success included optimizing alerts, assigning dedicated staff, and partnering with third-party platforms.

In this study 54.8% of patients transmitted at least 1 alert during a 12-month period, totaling over 82,000 alerts. These alerts had a high proportion of false positives and other transmissions that did not require action. Automated software was identified as a potential solution to relieve some of this burden.

Although implantable loop recorders are vital to the diagnosis and management of cardiac arrhythmias they are responsible for the vast majority of remote transmissions, many of which are false alerts. There are opportunities to improve the usability of this data through reprogramming and third-party alert management tools.

Managing CIED transmissions is a complex and time-intensive process creating a heavy workload for clinics. Understanding this process and implementing new strategies, including the adoption of remote monitoring solutions, can create efficiencies for clinics.

This presentation outlines four major themes of dissatisfaction in remote monitoring: staffing ratios, increasing volume of remote follow-ups and device varieties, lack of patient participation and compliance, workflow, and data consolidation to the EMR.

This poster highlights that in a new EP office with a ratio of 257 patients:1 nurse practitioner is feasible. However, utilizing a third party yielded significantly more actionable events and billing revenue opportunities.

Despite cardiac devices delivering similar functionality, the data each manufacturer sends is variable across the industry. This creates additional challenges for clinic staff to interpret transmissions uniformly. Standard terminology and democratized data will improve clinic efficiency and the quality of patient care.

Managing transmission volume is a significant challenge for device clinics. This study demonstrated that remote monitoring could dramatically reduce non-actionable alerts compared to conventional care without diminishing the ability to detect critical alerts. Further, monitoring improved follow-up adherence and detected urgent clinical events significantly earlier than conventional care.