Redefining Prenatal Care through Remote Patient Monitoring | MedTel Healthcare

 

Overview

Pregnancy is all about celebration, excitement, change, and some challenges. While the experience is one of the most enriching ones, the medical-centric healthcare model makes mothers feel less connected and vulnerable especially if the pregnancy is associated with additional risk factors.

Leveraging technology like IoT (Internet of Things) and IoMT (Internet of Medical Things), can help reduce this disconnect and empower women to monitor their pregnancy themselves while constantly being connected to their doctors. This will not only ensure timely detection of complications and better insights for the doctors but also make mothers take greater charge of their pregnancy.

Source: Maternal Health Learning and Innovation Center

Pregnancy and Its Challenges

With a flurry of symptoms and challenges ranging from nausea, bloating and headache to reduced fetal movement, the perception of what comes under an alarming signal is often not very clear to mothers.

Adding to this, the lack of authentic and relevant information on nutrition, care, delivery, and other aspects of pregnancy makes mothers feel more vulnerable and less involved. This makes them anxious about every little change they experience during their pregnancy. In such instances, the need for a system where a patient can receive constant monitoring and reassurance from their healthcare providers becomes necessary.

High-Risk Pregnancy

A high-risk pregnancy is when a pregnant lady has one or more conditions that raise her, or her baby’s, chances for health problems or preterm delivery. Around 30% of the pregnancies in India are high risk.

These are some common high-risk conditions (India) and the complications these could potentially cause.

To manage such high-risk pregnancies effectively and reduce the complications associated with them, such pregnant ladies have a high frequency of visits to their doctors which is inconvenient and makes the current healthcare model very rigid and not considerate of the emotional needs of an expecting mother.

Moreover, due to a lack of reliable and actionable information and alternate channels to reach out to their healthcare providers, there is significant friction in asking questions regarding changes women see in their bodies and how these changes might affect their babies. This confusion either persists throughout their pregnancy or these are resolved by family members and sources on the internet which may or may not be reliable.

All of these factors add up and increase the anxiety and confusion regarding their pregnancy, delivery, and the health of their baby.

Leveraging Technology

Technological advancement has given us a broad scope of opportunity to digitize the healthcare system at affordable costs. Digital Healthcare technologies like IoMT have the incredible potential not just to reduce the information flow barrier between doctor-patient and improve patient outcomes, but also get better insights from the huge pool of data and quickly arrive at data-informed conclusions.

The capabilities of such a system are accurate diagnosis, faster intervention, fewer mistakes, higher patient engagement, and lesser costs of care. Once paired with smartphones, this technology enables patients to send their health information (vitals, abnormal symptoms, etc.) to their doctors to better monitor their condition.

The most common and useful domain of application of IoMT is Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM).

Remote Patient Monitoring is about moving healthcare out of the constraints of hospitals and clinics and into the houses and workplaces of people where they really live and spend most of their time. It is about integrating consumer-friendly technology like smartphones and tablets along with monitoring devices so that people feel comfortable managing their own health along with constantly being connected to their doctors.

Why Rpm During Pregnancy and How Does It Work?

One of the biggest drawbacks of the traditional healthcare system is that healthcare isn’t perceived to be a part of routine life. It seems event-based, restricted to hospitals and clinic visits. This makes mothers feel that their condition is not in their control to resolve. Along with that, the entire lifestyle change that they have to go through makes it even more difficult for them to stick to their healthcare plan.

Giving mothers a way to monitor themselves would increase the involvement they have in their pregnancy while ensuring that they stay comfortable. This will not only improve engagement but also equip their healthcare provider with sufficient data and insights to get a better picture of the patient’s status.

In an RPM setup, mothers would be given a set of devices that they can use to monitor themselves at home. These devices will be connected to their smartphone/tablet and their vitals will be updated here. Once updated, these readings will be displayed to their healthcare provider along with insights. In case of an emergency, the patient and the doctor would be alerted immediately for timely action.

Resource URL:- https://medtel.io/blog/redefining-prenatal-care-through-remote-patient-monitoring/