RPM in 2026: A major coverage change by a huge health insurer

United Healthcare has grown to become a giant across the U.S. health care system. So when that company calls remote patient monitoring “unproven and not medically necessary due to insufficient evidence of efficacy” for a number of chronic conditions, industry watchers take notice. Lucienne Marie Ide, M.D., Ph.D., is founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that operates remote patient monitoring and chronic care management systems. Here she discusses the ramifications of that policy.

Editor’s note: This conversation took place after United Healthcare announced its 2026 coverage rationale in fall 2025, but before United Healthcare announced in December 2025 that it “instead will implement the policy later in 2026.”

Medical Economics: In recent days, United Healthcare has announced its coverage rationale for remote physiologic monitoring for heart failure and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. The company has stated that RPM is unproven and not medically necessary due to insufficient evidence of efficacy for several other conditions. Can you talk about what is happening with this situation, especially because United Healthcare is such a large insurer?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: This has been quite the dialogue online and in person over the past couple of weeks since they made this announcement. I share the sort of opinion of many other people in the market that I think it's shortsighted. I think you can prove any point of view that you set out to prove by selecting the data and the case studies that you want to use. So there's a lot of evidence of the efficacy and benefit of RPM for conditions like hypertension and diabetes. Those are probably the two standout ones that they are excluding that I think really surprised the market, because those are very common conditions that affect, you know, millions of Americans and have been use cases that have been pretty widely deployed and shown benefit in RPM. I really think of RPM now, is [that] we're getting to the point that it's standard of care, right, that it is just going to be part of the way that we deliver health care, and it's going to be an expectation from patients, of, why can't you leverage my data at home and monitor me at home? I'm able to have that kind of relationship with other services in my life, like financial services, my lawyer, my accountant, my bank. And the clinicians really understand the benefit. So if you take that point of view and say, this is really just part of the way we deliver health care — imagine if United had said, you know, not every visit to the primary care physician is effective for improving blood pressure outcomes, and so we're just not going to cover evaluation and management visits where hypertension is the primary diagnosis. That would be outrageous, right? But yet, we know that there are patients who see a physician for years with poorly managed blood pressure, and that not all health care is equally effective, not every physician is equally effective, and that is the market, and that is the practice of medicine. And so I find it very curious that they are coming in and sort of cherry-picking what they're going to cover when we're also at this inflection point, as we just talked about, of Medicare really expanding coverage, adoption of these programs growing exponentially. So I won't be surprised if we see further change, maybe in response to all the pushback they're getting, maybe in response to the delusion of data people are going to send them trying to prove the efficacy of [obesity] programs.