Educating New Rural Providers About Remote Patient Monitoring for Heart Failure Patients

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to increase the knowledge of new providers in the Rural Telehealth Certificate Program (RTCP) at the University of Arizona about the benefits of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) for heart failure patients. This project also assessed the intent of new providers to incorporate RPM into their practice. Background: Studies show that 75% of 30-day readmissions could be prevented if heart failure management was focused on patient understanding and compliance of their heart failure self-care (Sohn et al., 2020). Retrospective research of remote monitoring has shown decreased hospital readmissions as well as decreased emergency department visits (Lynch et al., 2022). Methods: An educational PowerPoint presentation about RPM was distributed to new providers through the RTCP coordinator. A pretest-posttest was available to the new providers to fill out at the beginning and end of the presentation, respectively. This helped evaluate the effectiveness of the educational presentation and any intent to incorporate RPM into current or future practice. Results: Two new rural providers participated in the intervention and completed the anonymous pretest-posttest. There was a positive change score for both participants for the Likert-scale questions. They both also indicated in the open-format questions of their intent to utilize RPM in their current/future practice. Conclusions: Due to a small sample size, results are not generalizable, but may imply that educating new rural providers about RPM for heart failure patients could initiate future RPM use for eligible patients. This would potentially benefit rural providers and improve their patient outcomes. The overall conclusion depicts that education on RPM benefits and utilization for heart failure patients should be pushed forward fervently.