The Continua Health Alliance is doing a good job in getting remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices to become plug-n-play — where devices and peripherals from different manufacturers complying with Continua Guidelines will be able to talk to one another.
Continua’s work-to-date is a necessary, but not yet sufficient effort to make RPM devices mainstream.
Knocking down the barrier of device-incompatibilty exposes the bigger barrier of lack of data interoperability among RPM technologies and between RPM devices and health care IT systems. Jonathan Edwards, research VP and lead telemedicine analyst for Gartner, nails the issue:
The biggest obstacle…is not the devices themselves but transmittal of data from those devices, and the lack of an infrastructure to monitor and detect the data. Without an appropriate recording system, the information collected cannot be compared to normal health criteria and therefore is of limited use to doctors and other providers. [Technology drives advances in home health monitoring, WTN News; April 2, 2008]
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