RPM in 2026: Flexibility to optimize minutes spent on patient care

Minutes spent monitoring patient treatment may not sound like much, but the time can be important for patients and their physicians. Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that operates remote patient monitoring and chronic care management systems. Here she explains why added flexibility in monitoring time could be beneficial for patient care.

Medical Economics: Ten minutes may not sound like much, but can you talk about why that's so important for patient care?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: I mean, you know, part of these sort of virtual care models and remote patient monitoring being one, is really being able to proactively manage a population of patients who have a condition. So, again, within that population of patients, different patients are going to have different needs at a given moment of time. Maybe because of something going on with your disease state, something going on with your life, other comorbidities or acute illnesses. So, in a given month, a patient might need 35 or 40 minutes of monitoring and engagement, and then you kind of get them teed back up, and they're doing better and you're more monitoring — OK, are they stable? Am I keeping there? And maybe they only need 12 minutes of monitoring, and so this is providing that flexibility to really tailor the intervention a little bit more to patient needs and not have this 20 minutes or nothing model.