EPISODE 07
At-home medical equipment isn’t something new, but there is fresh innovation of remote monitoring tech that is changing the face of patient/doctor interactions. On today’s episode, Jenny welcomes one of the top innovators in this field, Bryan Potter, Head of Remote Patient Monitoring at Greater Goods, one of the leading providers of smart medical devices for remote patient monitoring. Their company was recently recognized by Forbes, for having the two top blood pressure monitoring devices on the market. Their products are a far cry from the older, confusing and cumbersome home devices. It’s a new frontier in the way that patients interact with their healthcare providers remotely.
Bryan gives a brief history of in-home monitoring devices and also what he sees as their future. He lays out the issues and hurdles that some more well-known tech companies face in being able to scale their products, and how his organization’s focus on patient needs and financial realities shape their products.
Watch their discussion below or listen to the podcast, We Are Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast.
Other Links and Resources
- https://www.me.health
- Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/health/healthy-aging/best-blood-pressure-monitors/
- Wirecutter April Top 100 picks: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/lists/100-most-popular-picks-april-2022/
- Wirecutter Top BPMs: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-blood-pressure-monitors-for-home-use/
- Sports Illustrated – Best Bathroom Scale for Body Composition: https://www.si.com/showcase/health/best-bathroom-scales
Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanpotter/
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Full Transcript:
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Jenny Bristow and I’m the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency based in the Midwest. We started the We Are, Marketing Happy podcast because of our passion for improving patients access to care. And understanding the innovations and shifts in the healthcare industry are key to making that happen.
Please follow, share, and let us know what topics you’d like for us to cover next, enjoy.
Hi friends. Welcome to today’s podcast episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Today I’m so excited to have Bryan Potter on. He is the head of remote patient monitoring solutions at Greater Goods. Why don’t we get started, Bryan, by having you tell us a little bit about Greater Goods and the RPM work you’re doing.
BRYAN: Yeah, so first off, thanks so much for having us on. We really do appreciate it. So Greater Goods. We’ve been around for about 17 years at this point, and we are based in St. Louis, Missouri. [00:01:00] Smart Scales is kind of where we got our start. And then we kind of evolved into smart medical devices.
We have become one of the top providers for smart medical devices in the remote patient monitoring space. And we’ve actually spun up a separate arm, a remote patient monitoring called My Everyday Health, which is actually what I also lead.
Jenny: So I heard that you have recently been awarded some pretty big things from Forbes.Tell us a little bit about.
BRYAN: Yeah, so we I just recently found out about this. So we were selected by Forbes – we have two of their top blood pressure monitor picks. So if you go to forbes.com, you can actually look up their blood pressure monitors and we have best kit and best value. So, It was kind of a great honor for us.
Definitely caught us off guard. Wasn’t expecting that at all.
Jenny: Well, you deserve it. I mean, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on is you and I are both located in the St. Louis, Missouri area and we met in person for coffee and you actually brought your blood oxygenation product to our meeting. You set it up. [00:02:00] Had me actually test it, and I was completely blown away. My grandmother has some remote patient or RPM solutions she has to do every single day for a nurse that monitors her remotely and the technology she has to use is so archaic with such a difficult interface, she often has to call either my mom or one of her granddaughters to come over to help her troubleshoot it. And so the first thing I thought of when I saw your solutions was, wow, this can massively improve a patient’s experience in the way that they interact with their physician or nurse remotely.
BRYAN: So, yeah, remote patient monitoring space is definitely an interesting one, especially when it comes to devices.
A lot of people I feel like forget the patient experience just as a whole. I mean, there are still some pretty archaic solutions out there where you basically get a giant box that has some questions and it, it is a cellular box, but you have wires coming out of it that might have a pulse box or a scale and a blood pressure monitor connected to it, and it, it’s [00:03:00] kind of unwieldy and, and just not very nice to have in the house.
Very cumbersome. Those go from patient to patient and they get kind of gross over time as well.
Jenny: Absolutely. So one of the things that I would love to have you walk through for all of our listeners, is the evolution of remote patient monitoring tools, kind of when this industry became a thing for the first time, was technology sophisticated enough to be able to send something to a patient’s home?
And then where are we today? How do your tools be able to fit into the greater ecosystem?
BRYAN: Yeah, so remote patient monitoring has actually been around for quite some time. It goes back even to early 3g. So if you remember your 3G cell phones, there were remote patient minor solutions that used 3g.
So there were cellular connections. Again, they were kind of archaic and at the way they were set up. And we really haven’t moved too far past those at this point. I mean, you can still get a box that might have a 4G or 5G connection in it, but it’s still a large box [00:04:00] that has three or four peripherals hanging off of it from a wire.
The patient experience on that is not great by any means. Now there are other solutions out there, other cellular devices and things like that out that really have helped kind of move remote patient monitoring along. But it’s still not a great patient experience. So one of the things that we try and do is when we develop our devices or our solutions, we try and take it from the approach of what’s the patient population, who’s actually going to be using these devices?
And how do we give them an experience where they actually enjoy using the devices and they don’t feel like they’re having to like walk to their counter every day and like walk of shame, if you will. And take all of their vitals. They can have a scale actually in their bathroom, so that makes sense.
They can take their weight, it actually gets registered, the providers can see it. Blood pressure monitor, same thing. They can keep it in their bedroom so no one actually has to know that they’re being monitored. Gives them a little bit more privacy and, and a little bit more dignity as well.
Jenny: Yeah, that’s an excellent point.
I mean, one thing that I brought up whenever we met for the first time, because I had just [00:05:00] read, I think the week before Apple’s Health State of the Union or the state of the State, they were kind of walking through how they thought Apple devices were going to be the really big solution to remote patient monitoring.
And as a person who wasn’t super familiar with the ins and outs of the solutions that were available, I found their approach really interesting. But you had some really good points around why that may not be a super scalable model. I’d love to hear that perspective again.
BRYAN: Yeah, so Apple obviously makes amazing products.
They have a great ecosystem, but they’re also expensive. You kind of pay for that Apple experience, if you will, in the remote patient monitoring space that those products don’t necessarily fit on a financial side. There’s reimbursement right now going on through cms, which is Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s not a whole lot of money that’s being reimbursed to the providers or the solution provider.
So you have to come up with a creative way to be able to give the patient a really good experience. To get the provider the data that they need, and make sure that the patient stays compliant. So how do you do that [00:06:00] and keep costs down? So that’s a very difficult thing to do. I think Apple, again, the solutions are amazing, but keeping the financial side of it.
The business is gonna be tough.
Jenny: Yep. Absolutely. I agree with that completely. So talk to me about the future of RPM and where we’re going. I mean, if you were able to look five years into the future, what do you hope will be the case? Not only for patients here in the United States, but worldwide?
BRYAN: Oh, that great question.
I mean, remote patient monitoring has the ability to really do some great things for healthcare. I mean, the more data that we can gather, the more we can kind of take a look at these different disease states and and see if there’s anything that we can do to actually prevent them even in real time.
But the problem is there’s not enough data being collected today, and the data that is being collected is pretty basic. So how do we gather the data and then apply either AI or or machine learning on top of it, and then understand what the patient’s outcome was when they had certain metrics or or readings with their vitals.
[00:07:00] I think in five years what we’re gonna be able to do is we’re gonna be able to have solutions that will help patients understand their health better, which hopefully will lead them down a better path. But at the same time, if somebody is about to have a major catastrophic life event, maybe we can have some earlier intervention and actually be able to provide some solutions for them before this catastrophic event happens.
Jenny: Yeah. And how about integration with telehealth? I mean, that’s an area that I see a lot of opportunity for growth, not just for ongoing monitoring, but also for one time appointments and being able to do evaluations and otherwise difficult to manage situations.
BRYAN: Yeah, that’s gonna be a tough one to solve for these kind of one off visits, just because how do you get the technology or the information from the patient to the provider in a way that is meaningful and useful in making sure that the patient, if they’re taking their own vitals, is doing it appropriately? Yeah. I think that there’s definitely a lot of opportunity within telehealth, but there’s a lot of problems to solve as well, which is, how do you, how do you get the devices to them?
How if you need them [00:08:00] to go to a lab that might be two or three hours away, how can we do in-home blood tests? How can we do any sort of testing at home that is accurate, that helps the provider actually diagnose an issue. There’s definitely challenges there, and it’s gonna be something that I think we’re gonna be dealing with for quite some time.
But I think there’s definitely opportunities in the space.
Jenny: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be really fun to watch how it can completely transform the patient experience, especially those in rural areas. Or some folks that are more socioeconomically disadvantaged without transportation or whatever you’re dealing with.
Well, Bryan, thank you so much for being on today’s episode. I’m gonna link to not only your website, but I’m going to link to the Forbes article as well as your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So I would highly encourage anyone who’s interested in talking about this more in detail with you to reach out because you are a fabulous conversationalist and, I’m sure that they’d have a lot of fun.
BRYAN: I really appreciate that, Jenny. Thank you so much again for having us on. [00:09:00]
