Remote patient monitoring (RPM) streams device readings — weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, pulse oximetry, heart rate — from a patient's home to a care team that watches the trend over time and intervenes when something looks wrong. In rhythm it is asynchronous: the clinician is not on a live call with the patient. In volume, though, it is continuous, producing a steady flow of data points that must be ingested, stored, and interpreted reliably day after day.
That combination pushes the engineering toward device integration (connecting to many makes and models of cuffs, scales, glucometers, and wearables), time-series storage built for high-frequency readings, alerting logic that distinguishes a true clinical anomaly from a sensor glitch, and escalation workflows that get an out-of-range reading in front of a human quickly. The clinical risk is not a dropped video call but a missed alert, so the reliability work concentrates in ingestion and notification.
Crucially, Medicare reimburses RPM through dedicated CPT codes that carry specific thresholds — a minimum number of days of readings in a period and a minimum amount of clinician time spent on management. Those billing rules directly shape your data model: you must count qualifying reading-days, track care-team time, and produce defensible records, or the service is unbillable even when it is clinically valuable. A common pitfall is building great dashboards but failing to capture the day-count and time evidence the codes require, leaving revenue unclaimable. All readings are Protected Health Information and inherit the full HIPAA safeguards.
