Remote Patient Monitoring Platforms vs. Build-Your-Own: What Healthcare Leaders Need to Know

I. Introduction

The demand for remote patient monitoring (RPM) has grown significantly post-2020, driven by the need to manage chronic conditions, enhance patient engagement, and reduce hospital readmissions. As healthcare organizations expand their use of telehealth, RPM has become an essential tool in delivering value-based care. However, hospitals—especially mid-market systems—are now faced with a critical question: should we invest in a remote patient monitoring platform or build a custom EHR-integrated RPM solution?

Choosing between adopting a remote patient monitoring platform or building a tailored solution is more than just a technical decision. For many healthcare leaders, it represents a strategic crossroads. While platforms offer speed and ease of integration, they come with limitations in terms of control and customization. Building a custom EHR-integrated RPM system, on the other hand, provides greater flexibility and deeper integration with existing clinical workflows but requires a significant upfront investment and longer implementation time.

The most successful organizations are starting to recognize that owning the integration layer—the key to effective remote patient monitoring—can be their greatest competitive advantage. What used to be a decision driven by compliance and interoperability is now about creating a system that truly fits their clinical needs and operational goals. In this post, we will break down the pros and cons of each option and provide actionable insights to help you decide which approach aligns best with your hospital’s strategic vision.

II. Why Every RPM Strategy Starts with EHR Control

A. The EHR as the Core of Patient Care

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is the backbone of healthcare delivery. It houses not only patient data but also the entire clinical, financial, and population health workflows. When you integrate a remote patient monitoring system directly with your EHR, you ensure that patient data from wearables and remote devices is seamlessly linked to the clinical workflows that clinicians already rely on. This integration eliminates silos, allowing for real-time data access and actionable insights across care teams.

A custom EHR-integrated RPM system ensures tight alignment between the monitored patient data and the clinical pathways that guide decision-making. Whether tracking vital signs or chronic conditions, having this data directly available in the EHR allows for quicker interventions, better care coordination, and improved patient outcomes.

B. Streamlined Clinical Workflows with Custom EHR Integration

With a custom RPM system, you can build data flow and alerts that match your existing clinical workflows. This allows clinicians to take action on remote patient data within the same systems they already use, without needing to learn new interfaces or switch between multiple platforms. This seamless integration promotes higher clinician adoption rates and improves the speed and accuracy of decision-making.

III. What a Remote Patient Monitoring Platform Offers — and Where It Stops

A. Key Benefits of RPM Platforms

1. Rapid Deployment: A remote patient monitoring platform allows for quick implementation. With prebuilt FHIR connectors and wearable SDKs, you can connect a wide range of devices to your system in just a few months. This is a key advantage for organizations looking to deploy a solution fast.
2. Built-in Compliance: One of the major benefits of platforms is that they come with HIPAA and SOC-2 compliance already built in. This ensures that the platform is secure and ready to handle sensitive patient data from day one.
3. Minimal IT Burden: Because the platform is managed in the cloud, internal IT teams are relieved from the responsibility of maintaining the infrastructure. This reduces operational complexity, allowing your staff to focus on patient care instead of system management.

B. Limitations of RPM Platforms

1. Limited Customization: One of the trade-offs of RPM platforms is the limited customization options. While platforms can integrate with various devices and EHR systems, the ability to tailor workflows and patient alerts to meet the unique needs of your organization is often restricted.
2. Data Silos: While platforms offer great device compatibility, patient data often exists outside the EHR, making it challenging to obtain a comprehensive view of the patient’s health. This lack of full integration can hinder clinical decision-making, as clinicians may need to access multiple systems to get the complete patient picture.
3. Escalating Vendor Dependency and Costs: As your RPM needs grow, so too do licensing and vendor fees. Over time, this dependency can result in higher costs and reduced flexibility. The platform may also be limited by the vendor’s roadmap and future product offerings, preventing your system from evolving to meet changing needs.

IV. The Case for Building Your Own EHR-Integrated RPM

A. Strategic Advantage of Full Control

When you build your own EHR-integrated RPM system, you gain complete control over the data, workflows, and innovation cycle. You can design the system to fit your organization’s specific needs, ensuring that it aligns with your clinical goals and operational objectives. Unlike with a platform, where you are dependent on external vendors, a custom solution provides the flexibility to evolve as your needs change.

Having this level of control means that you can adapt your RPM system to support new devices, workflows, and healthcare models without being limited by the platform’s capabilities. Over time, this customization yields dividends by enhancing patient outcomes, boosting clinician satisfaction, and minimizing operational inefficiencies.

B. Deeper Epic/Cerner Integration

A custom-built RPM system can integrate deeply with your existing Epic EHR or Cerner EHR. By building SMART-on-FHIR apps within Hyperspace, your RPM system can directly feed vital signs and other patient data into the clinician’s workflow. This native integration ensures that the information clinicians need is readily available and can be acted upon quickly, without the need to switch between multiple systems.

1. Automating data ingestion: You can automate the intake of vital signs and other key data from remote devices directly into the EHR, saving clinicians time and improving accuracy.
2. Alert routing: Alerts and notifications based on real-time data can be routed directly to the relevant care team members, enabling faster decision-making.

C. Clinical and Business ROI

Building your own RPM system offers a long-term cost benefit. While the initial investment may be higher, especially if you are integrating with an existing EHR, the return on investment (ROI) over time is substantial. Custom systems reduce reliance on third-party vendors, resulting in lower ongoing fees and less vendor lock-in.

Moreover, a custom EHR-integrated RPM system enables you to deliver a differentiated care experience that is aligned with your organization’s brand. You can tailor the system to meet the needs of both clinicians and patients, thereby driving engagement and improving health outcomes. This directly impacts your bottom line by reducing costs associated with readmissions and improving patient satisfaction.

D. Compliance and Security by Design

When you build your own RPM system, you have full control over compliance and security. This means you can design the system to meet HIPAA and SOC-2 requirements, as well as implement encryption and access controls tailored to your organization’s specific needs. By embedding compliance features into the system’s design, you ensure that patient data is always secure and that you are prepared for audits or reporting requirements.

Furthermore, building your own system enables you to establish custom audit trails and data access policies, ensuring complete transparency and accountability for all patient data.

E. Scalability by Design

A custom RPM system is scalable from the start. The vendor’s roadmap does not limit you and can be expanded to include new devices, AI models, or other functionalities as needed. Whether you want to integrate new wearables, implement predictive analytics for readmission risk, or roll out new population health management tools, you have the flexibility to grow your system as your needs evolve.

V. Head-to-Head: Remote Patient Monitoring Platform vs. Build-Your-Own EHR-Integrated RPM

VI. Build Once, Reuse Everywhere: Leveraging FHIR for Scale

A. Future-Proof Your RPM Build

When you build your own EHR-integrated RPM system, you can future-proof your solution by leveraging FHIR APIs. These standardized data exchange protocols allow your system to easily integrate with new devices, AI tools, and health data platforms as they emerge. This scalability ensures that your RPM system remains adaptable and capable of supporting future healthcare innovations.

By using FHIR, your system can expand without major overhauls, enabling you to continually incorporate the latest advancements in patient monitoring and care delivery. As new devices and technology come online, you can seamlessly integrate them into your existing system, maintaining continuity in your workflows.

B. Standardized Data Exchange Supports AI and Population Health Tools

1. AI Models for Disease Prediction: A FHIR-integrated RPM system enables seamless integration with predictive analytics tools, such as those that forecast readmission risk or medication adherence. By incorporating real-time patient data from wearable devices and other sources, these AI models can enhance clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes.
2. Integration with Population Health Dashboards: You can utilize FHIR to integrate your RPM system with population health dashboards, offering a unified view of patient health across various care settings. This integration helps healthcare providers track and manage patient populations more effectively, identifying at-risk individuals and implementing timely interventions.

Example: A Health Monitoring Platform utilized FHIR to integrate data from multiple sources, including wearables, to improve clinician diagnostic accuracy by 45%. Additionally, their system experienced a 60% increase in clinician engagement, thanks to more actionable insights derived from integrated data.

VII. Compliance by Design — Why Build Doesn’t Mean Risk

A. Embedded Compliance

One of the primary concerns when adopting a remote patient monitoring system is ensuring that patient data is handled in a compliant and secure manner. With a remote patient monitoring platform, compliance is often built into the vendor’s platform. However, when you build your own RPM system, you retain full control over compliance features. This allows you to tailor your system to meet HIPAA, SOC-2, and other regulatory requirements from the outset.

By building compliance into the architecture of your EHR-integrated RPM system, you eliminate the risk of compliance gaps that may arise later in the process. This proactive approach ensures your system is ready for audits and reporting requirements, reducing the risk of data breaches or regulatory penalties.

B. Customizable Encryption and Access Controls

When you control the architecture of your RPM system, you have the flexibility to implement customized encryption, PHI anonymization, and data access controls. These customizable features are crucial for meeting stringent security requirements and maintaining patient trust. In addition, you can design your system’s access control protocols to ensure that only authorized users can view sensitive patient data, providing a higher level of security than many third-party platforms offer.

Custom audit trails and data access logging also become part of your compliance design. These features allow you to track who accesses patient data, when it is accessed, and for what purpose, ensuring full transparency and accountability.

C. Reducing Build Time with Mindbowser Accelerators

Building a custom EHR-integrated RPM system from scratch can be a time-consuming process. However, Mindbowser offers accelerators like WearConnect and AI Medical Summary that reduce the time and effort needed to get your system up and running. These pre-built solutions help accelerate the integration process while ensuring compliance with established standards. By using these tools, healthcare organizations can significantly shorten the development timeline while maintaining high levels of compliance and security.