Treffer: National Patterns of Remote Patient Monitoring Service Availability at US Hospitals.

Background: Digital remote patient monitoring (RPM), such as home-based blood pressure, heart rate, or weight monitoring, enables longitudinal care outside traditional health care settings, especially in the vulnerable period after hospitalizations, with broad coverage of the service by payers. We sought to evaluate patterns of RPM service availability at US hospitals and the characteristics of hospitals and the counties they serve that are associated with the availability of these services.
Methods: We used national data from the American Hospital Association Annual Survey from 2018 to 2022 to ascertain US hospitals offering RPM services for postdischarge or chronic care. We linked hospitals with their census-based county-level data to define the characteristics of the counties they serve, including sociodemographic features such as age distribution, racial/ethnic composition, median household income, education level, and disability status. We used multivariable logistic regression to assess associations between hospital- and county-level characteristics and RPM availability, adjusting for hospital size, region, teaching status, and ownership.
Results: The study included 5644 hospitals. Over 5 years of study, there was a 40.3% increase in the number of hospitals offering RPM services, rising from 1364 (33.0%) hospitals in 2018 to 1797 (46.3%) in 2022. In 2022, hospitals with >300 beds had 3.7-fold odds of offering RPM compared with those with <100 beds (adjusted odds ratio, 3.71 [95% CI, 2.90-4.74]). Nonteaching hospitals had lower odds of RPM availability than teaching hospitals (adjusted odds ratio, 0.29 [95% CI, 0.19-0.44]), and rural hospitals had lower odds than urban hospitals (adjusted odds ratio, 0.49 [95% CI, 0.32-0.77]).
Conclusions: In this national study of US hospitals, there has been a large increase in the availability of RPM services but with large variation among hospitals, with lower availability in hospitals serving low-income and rural counties.

Dr Khera is an Associate Editor of JAMA. He receives support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (under awards R01AG089981, R01HL167858, and K23HL153775), the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (under award 2022060), and the Blavatnik Family Foundation. He also receives research support, through Yale, from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, and BridgeBio. He is a coinventor of US Pending Patent Applications WO2023230345A1, US20220336048A1, 63/346610, 63/484426, 63/508315, 63/580137, 63/606203, 63/619241, 63/562335 and 18/813882. He is a cofounder of Ensight-AI, Inc, and Evidence2Health, health platforms to improve cardiovascular diagnosis and evidence-based cardiovascular care. Dr Ross reported grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ, R01HS022882) during the conduct of the study; grants from the US Food and Drug Administration, Johnson & Johnson, Medical Devices Innovation Consortium, grants from the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH/NHLBI), and Arnold Ventures outside the submitted work; and serving as an expert witness at the request of Relator’s attorneys, the Greene Law Firm, in a qui tam suit alleging violations of the False Claims Act and AntiKickback Statute against Biogen, Inc that was settled September 2022. Dr Lin reported working under contracts with CMS to develop quality measures. The other author reports no conflicts.