• Posted November 5, 2025

Remote Health Monitoring Increases Doctors' Ability To See More Patients

Health care has been revolutionized by devices that can remotely monitor people’s vital signs, allowing doctors to keep tabs on things like blood pressure between office visits.

Such monitoring might also help people more easily see a family doctor, a new study says.

Practices that adopt remote monitoring technology can treat more patients, including ones with more complex health problems, researchers reported Nov. 3 in the journal Health Affairs.

“In a time when many call for a strengthening of primary care, our study offers cautious optimism that technologies like remote physiologic monitoring (RPM) can make primary care more accessible, proactive and patient-centered,” researcher Ariel Stern said in a news release. She’s a professor of digital health, economics and policy at University of Potsdam in Germany.

Previous studies have shown that patient outcomes improve if doctors use remote monitoring to better track their health, researchers said in background notes.

But this is an early look at how remote monitoring affects medical practices, researchers said.

“RPM services are often touted as a way for practices to both improve patient care and increase revenue, but it’s not a given that this will happen,” lead researcher Mitchell Tang said in a news release. Tang is an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Using national Medicare data, researchers identified 754 primary care practices that began billing for remote monitoring between 2019 and 2021.

Results showed that those practices saw a 20% increase in Medicare revenue during the next two years, compared to practices that didn’t adopt remote monitoring.

Most of the increase stemmed from billing for remote monitoring, but about a quarter of the revenue came from more office visits and more management of patients' health problems.

“There was concern that the added time and resources to provide RPM to some patients would come at a cost – other patients in the practice might struggle to get care,” Tang said.

Instead, practices saw more patients overall, with much of the added activity focused on individuals with worse health problems, researchers found.

However, researchers warned that unchecked adoption of remote monitoring could substantially increase Medicare spending.

"Thoughtful reimbursement policies, such as evidence-based limits on monitoring duration and patient eligibility, are key to incentivize high value RPM services and ensure sustainability of RPM moving forward,” Stern said.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on remote patient monitoring.

SOURCE: Columbia University, news release, Nov. 3, 2025