New Remote Patient Monitoring Time Tracker Now Available on BodySite for Easier RPM Management and Implementation

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) can be used in your practice to improve patient care and increase practice revenue with less effort and no additional practice time. Chronic conditions cost the U.S. over $3 trillion annually, but improved management of chronic conditions can prevent or delay many costly events such as emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If RPM helps patients keep measurements such as blood pressure within range, risks for serious and costly emergency situations, such as severe hypertension, may decrease.

What Is RPM?

For years, medical and wellness providers have watched income decline as the landscape of healthcare has forced them to see an increasing number of patients even as lower reimbursements and greater competition have lowered revenue. Shorter time with patients puts the focus on reactive care rather than on wellness and no one benefits. More sick patients means more volume but no increase in profit margin. And that leads to practice burn out.

Working smarter, rather than harder, is the only way out of this cycle. Now more than ever, it is vital for your practice to focus on your patients’ care beyond the four walls of the office in a way that multiplies the time you spend to the greatest benefit for the patient—and for your bottom line. After an encounter with a patient, how do you know they are keeping up with your guidance, and how often do patients actually follow what their health care provider tells them? Low patient adherence leads to less than optimal patient outcomes and ultimately puts the patient back into the doctor’s office costing you and your practice more time and money.

Many digital and tele-health tools available today allow your practice to not only improve the level of care you bring to your patients, but also generate new revenue. One such tool is Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), which gives providers the ability to remotely monitor and guide patient care automatically with very little onboarding and at a cost that not only pays for itself, but increases practice revenue with very little effort.

Get access to our full RPM Implementation Guide here.

New CPT codes related to RPM and the devices that are used to facilitate RPM, allow your practice to benefit from your patient’s participation in using connected scales, blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, activity trackers and so much more. In many cases, patients would be using these anyway. But when YOU provide these connected devices, you leverage a unique opportunity to benefit from a part of the patient cycle that healthcare providers were previously not as involved in.

RPM Time Tracking on BodySite

The CPT codes related to RPM require healthcare professionals to spend a certain amount of time each month on RPM with each RPM patient. It is important to keep track of this information in a place where it is stored securely, should you ever need that data and reporting for any reason. Because of that, BodySite launched our newest feature: RPM Time Tracking.

To turn on the RPM timer, log in to your BodySite account and go to Settings > Platform Settings and toggle “On” the Remote Patient Monitoring Time Tracking feature.

Once you’ve turned time tracking on, when you go into any patient record, the timer will automatically begin and will be stored with the label, “Automatically Tracked Time.” You can change the label for the timer, stop it and re-start it as needed. You will also see a tab on the left side of your patient records labeled “Time Log.” When you go into that tab, you will be able to see all time logs, edit the label as needed or add manually add time log entries.

The entries are securely stored in each patient record with the activity label, date, duration, and person the log was added by. You can use the “Download CSV” option to export the the report as a spreadsheet when needed. And, as of July 8, 2021 we’ve adding additional RPM Time Tracking Reporting. In addition to the report available inside each patient’s record under the “time log” section which can be downloaded as a CSV, you can now go to Reports from the top navigation bar > Time Tracking Progress reports to get other RPM time reports.

Generate a report for any date range and choose for the report include the whole team or just a specific team member. Once you hit “Go,” the report will include the overall patient summary with the total time logged for each patient during that time period and another table below with the line by line breakdown. The report will include the patient name, activity, date, duration and who it was added by. Both of these reports are able to be exported as a CSV.

If you’re not already using BodySite, you can try it free today at this link. If you have any questions about our RPM Timer, you can schedule a call to chat with us at this link.