For the many people who face the challenges of managing chronic conditions, the old model of care is not only becoming difficult but also prohibitive.
In brain health, traditional inpatient monitoring systems present a myriad of barriers. They often require travel to a specialized health center, are cumbersome and restrictive for patients, and technical requirements and limitations impede providers’ ability to even provide such services.
Today, advancements are disrupting this model to fuel the growth of person-enabled health and the ongoing treatment of chronic neurological disorders and conditions.
Patients want solutions that provide greater access, flexibility, and information and the market has listened. The Global Remote Healthcare Market Size was valued at $6.7 Billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 33.5 Billion by 2032, according to a research report published by Spherical Insights & Consulting.
Meeting individuals where they are in their everyday lives is the hallmark of person-enabled healthcare, and the ability to deliver on this promise—one that was once thought of as merely aspirational—is now a reality.
The Impact of Centralized Healthcare
Historically, epilepsy has been a key contributor to the overall cost of treating neurological conditions. A 2017 Annals of Neurology study reported the overall cost of treating neurological conditions to be nearly $800 Billion dollars annually. With average hospital stays of 3.6 days for patients with epilepsy, the aggregate hospital costs alone for people with epilepsy totaled approximately $2.5 billion.
According to The American Journal of Managed Care ( AJMC) reported data, whether it is the result of stroke or a chronic condition, epilepsy or convulsion diagnosis has led to more than 1 million emergency department (ED) visits and 280,000 hospital admissions.
Up until recently, there was little that could be done to mitigate these skyrocketing and ongoing costs attributed to the 70 million people across the world living with epilepsy.
Arguably, an even greater cost, and one that has been difficult to track, has been the negative impact that many patients experience on their quality of life. Indeed, a recent study revealed that almost one in two people living with epilepsy had reported poor quality of life. The unpredictability of seizures is a significant factor, eroding self-confidence and self-esteem. This can also include the stress of long-distance travel to a specialized medical facility and its associated expense, time away from family, work, and school, and losing the ability to function independently without being hindered by standard monitoring protocols, not to mention the long wait times of months to even get EEG monitoring.
Traditional paradigms, involving inpatient monitoring units, have been broken for a long time on all sides of the equation.
Existing EEG monitoring systems have traditionally been cumbersome and restrictive for patients. Technical requirements and limitations have impeded providers’ ability to administer, record, and interpret EEG. The one equalizing factor that has driven the rapid advancement of remote EEG monitoring technologies is that seizures rarely happen in the hospital; they happen wherever the patient may be at any given time and without notice.
Leading the Shift to Person-Enabled Healthcare: Remote EEG Monitoring Systems
Leveraging a more person-enabled framework that puts the patient at the center of it all helps providers ultimately deliver better outcomes through more personalized monitoring and treatment options for the multitude of patients experiencing infrequent seizures that standard 72-hour ambulatory EEG studies may miss or be unable to differentiate adequately.
Extended-duration ambulatory EEGs can amass weeks’ worth of data needed to detect and assess seizures accurately. This data is valuable for forming an informed diagnosis, but reviewing and interpreting large volumes of data is time-consuming for neurologists and can itself lead to lengthy delays for patients and providers finalizing informed treatment decisions.
There is a clinical need though for this data. Patients with infrequent seizures may go years without a definitive diagnosis and characterization of their seizure events, which may result in the use of medications that are not necessary, drastically increasing out-of-pocket costs and overall burden on the healthcare system. Most significantly, some patients may not be started on medications because the events they experience went unrecorded and thus could never be confirmed to be seizures.
Now, remote EEG monitoring technologies offer a more personalized level of care through the use of single-use, single-patient, disposable, wearable sensors intended to amplify, capture, and wirelessly transmit the brain’s electrical activity for weeks. These new technologies give patients and caregivers more control of the monitoring process. And they also remove the burdens of fully wired systems that can inhibit patients from performing daily activities and bring with them additional stigma.
Patient-Enabled Innovations in Brain Health Help Deliver Treatment Strategies with Greater Precision, Faster
Remote monitoring can provide new opportunities for the field of brain health using advancements in technology, such as patient-enabled mobile software applications.
Remote monitoring of patients brings the promise of further improving outcomes for patients, allowing medical professionals to cull insights and deliver treatment strategies with a higher level of ease and speed of interpretation. New technologies fill that promise for brain health monitoring by getting EEG data from remote EEG sensors on patients’ scalps to secure cloud-based environments where the data can be reviewed and interpreted by qualified medical professionals.
With the help of AI/ML technology, remote monitoring technologies will, over time, also improve our ability to detect potential seizures, with individual patient data driving informed diagnoses and leading to a world where physicians can provide better, more informed clinical care. These investments and innovations in remote healthcare and more specifically, remote monitoring for brain health, are helping patients and providers make better-informed treatment decisions and achieve great strides in patient options and outcomes.
Remote monitoring technologies are clearly set to make a difference for patients in a broader way than ever before by acting as a key agent for change across the broader patient-enabled paradigm.
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