RPM in 2026: Focusing on obesity and effects of GLP-1 drugs

GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes, obesity and other conditions have made a huge splash across health care in the last few years. Why not combine those with a remote patient monitoring program to treat obesity as a chronic condition? Here is a brief analysis by Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a company that operates remote patient monitoring and chronic care management systems.

Medical Economics: Apart from the GLP-1 drugs or including those, how can remote patient monitoring be part of a treatment regimen for obesity?

Lucienne Marie Ide, MD, PhD: Yeah, I appreciate you asking about it, and there's a conference called Obesity Week that happens every year. It happened to be here in Atlanta this year, so that was great to get to participate in some of that. And I think part of it is just, as you said, treating obesity as the chronic condition that it is, right? And that has been a cultural change in medicine from the way medically, and scientifically and I think culturally, this country has thought about obesity. That it really is a medical condition, it's not a lack of willpower or a, failure of decision making that leads to that. So if we're going to now treat it as a chronic health condition, we should manage it and monitor it the way we do other chronic health conditions: Have a medical intervention with a patient, which might be pharmacologic, might be a GLP-1, might be some other surgical or lifestyle intervention. But then really being able to monitor the outcome of that. We've made a choice at this intervention, is this being effective for this patient? As measured by change in their weight because there may need to be dose escalation up or down on a drug. There may need to be side effect managements to keep that patient on that therapy. Many times people are putting these programs in place for patients who are good candidates for and choose to have surgery, but getting them ready for surgery and sort of maybe managing their weight leading into that and then post surgery. It’s an interesting time where we can sort of take aspects of disease management from other areas and apply them back to weight management and obesity. Another area that I think has been neglected is many patients with obesity have other comorbid conditions, like high blood pressure or diabetes. As they do lose significant percentage of their body weight, those medications are probably going to need to be adjusted as well. And again, we can do all of that if we have the data, right? So if I can monitor the patient's weight, identify that they've lost a significant amount of weight, understand what impact that has had on, say, their blood pressure at home, and maybe they can come off of a blood pressure medicine or decrease the dose. So, it all goes together.