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Remote Patient Monitoring in IBD: Current State and Future Directions

  • Inflammatory Bowel Disease (S Hanauer, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose of Review

Mobile apps are now increasingly used in conjunction with telemedicine and wearable devices to support remote patient monitoring (RPM). The goal of this paper is to review the available evidence and assess the scope of RPM integration into standard practices for care and management of chronic disease in general and, more specifically, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Recent Findings

RPM has been associated with improvements in health outcomes and indicators across a broad range of chronic diseases. However, there is limited data on the effectiveness of RPM in IBD care. From the emerging literature and body of research, we found promising results about the feasibility of integrating RPM in IBD care and RPM’s capacity to support IBD improvement in key process and outcome metrics.

Summary

Concerns regarding privacy and provider acceptability have limited the mass integration of RPM to date. However, with the healthcare industry’s move toward value-based population care and the advent of novel payment models for RPM reimbursement, the adoption of RPM into standard IBD care practices will likely increase as the technology continues to improve and become a mainstream tool for healthcare delivery in the near future.

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Funding

This work was funded in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1- TR001433), National Institutes of Health (5K23DK097451 - Atreja, A) and unrestricted grant from AbbVie Inc.

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Correspondence to Ashish Atreja.

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Conflict of Interest

Ashish Atreja has a patent pending for Digital Medicine Prescribing Platform, RxUniverse, and is the scientific co-founder for Rx.Health, for which he receives royalties.

Allyssa Deorocki, Emamuzo Otobo, and Karthik Ramireddy declare no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Inflammatory Bowel Disease

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Atreja, A., Otobo, E., Ramireddy, K. et al. Remote Patient Monitoring in IBD: Current State and Future Directions. Curr Gastroenterol Rep 20, 6 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11894-018-0611-3

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