Remote Patient Monitoring

A remote patient monitoring (RPM) company that marketed to physician offices wanted to accelerate its growth by adding a consumer pay offering. Health Business Group conducted consumer market research, identified partnership opportunities, and developed a go to market plan.

Background

• Client was growing its RPM business by marketing to physician offices. The approach was working but limited the pace of expansion

• Client believed its core RPM solution could be attractive as a concierge/self-pay model and that the consumer business could help accelerate physician uptake

Client request

• Research the market landscape, competitive environment, and regulatory issues

• Develop a consumer segmentation

• Create packages of solutions and obtain feedback from consumers on attractiveness and willingness to pay for each

• Make a go/no-go recommendation

• Outline a go to market plan

Key issues for consulting team to address

• Customer demand

  • Market segmentation by patient characteristics and geography

  • Evolution of consumer preferences and expectations

  • What benefits consumer are seeking that can be addressed by RPM

• Competitive environment

  • Identification of direct and indirect competitors. Lessons learned from their approaches to DTC messaging, solutions offered, pricing

  • Case studies of companies leveraging consumers to increase physician adoption

  • Opportunities to partner or acquire

• Reimbursement and regulatory

  • Interaction between self-pay and insurance models, e.g., can patients obtain reimbursement, differences by insurance type

  • How Client can leverage customer pull to generate new physician office business, transition patients from self-pay to insurance

  • Impact of new regulations on healthcare interoperability and patient access to data

Health Business Group approach

• Health Business Group leveraged two decades of knowledge of RPM to outline initial issues, develop hypotheses, and identify data sources

• Secondary data sources included the HBG knowledge base, industry and trade journals, surveys and reports on consumer adoption of digital health and wearables, government data, and analyst reports on public companies

• Primary sources included interviews with companies offering traditional personal emergency response systems (PERS), voice-enabled PERS, fall detection, medication adherence, and medical condition monitoring. Health Business Group also interviewed industry associations and experts

• Developed three packages to test with customers and conducted one-on-one sessions to gather feedback, and develop customer personas and preferences

• Synthesized findings into fact base to enable discussion and go/no go decision

• Outlined go to market plan, including target customer characteristics, pricing model and level, value proposition and sample messaging, differentiation from competition, distribution and marketing partners, resource requirements and timelines

Outcomes

• Validated Client hypothesis for consumer-pay RPM solution

• Enabled Client to launch the new offering within a few months of project conclusion