Tech & Innovation in Healthcare

Question: We have several patients diagnosed with MS that visit our practice. The severity of the disease differs for each patient, and many of them have to travel far to visit our practice. Could RPM be a treatment option for our patients suffering from MS?

Kansas Subscriber

Answer: Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a great option for receiving up-to-date information on your patients’ conditions while they go about their lives. RPM devices and apps make it easy for healthcare providers to get an accurate picture of how the patient’s conditions affect their daily lives.

Patients living with multiple sclerosis (MS) can experience a range of symptoms and those symptoms can range from mild to severe in intensity. MS symptoms may also be long lasting or occur in short time periods.

RPM would be a great option for monitoring the patient when they’re not in your office. For example, Dawn Health and Novartis recently released the Ekiva-MS app, which is a patient companion app for patients with MS. The RPM app was designed to help address the unmet needs of MS patients “around understanding disease activity and receiving support with their chronic care in the remote at-home setting,” wrote Dawn Health in a July 2023 press release.

The app provides insights into the patient’s disease to promote greater shared decision-making with the healthcare provider. With features such as quality-of-life tracking, symptom tracking, passive data collection, and digital biomarkers, the app promotes personalized, data-driven decision-making conversations with healthcare professionals while also supporting the patient.