We’ve been thinking about remote patient monitoring (RPM) the wrong way.

Picture this. A patient comes home from the hospital after a cardiac scare. They’ve got a smart scale on their chest, maybe a blood pressure cuff on the counter, and a nurse scheduled to stop by later in the week. The care team, the patient, and the tech are all working together in the hopes that things don’t get worse.

The patient feels watched but not necessarily cared for. The clinician gets bits of data, but sometimes too late or too limited to change the course of treatment. It’s a system built to track problems, not necessarily prevent them.

That’s what remote monitoring has come to mean for a lot of people. It’s a well-intentioned safety net, but it’s still reactive care. I think we can do better than that.

A new approach to preventive care

Patients are tired of the way health care is delivered today. So tired, in fact, that they are starting to turn to chatbots to help inform their health.

We need to flip the approach to preventive medicine and change the conversation. Instead of starting with “How have you been feeling?” what if a physician visit began with “Here’s what we’ve learned from the data we collected.” That’s the proactive, informed approach people are looking for, and it is completely possible.

Instead of sending a monitor home after a hospital stay, what if we sent it before a routine visit? A person could wear a small, comfortable device for a few days while they live their normal life and do ordinary tasks. That way, when they walk into their appointment, the doctor already has a snapshot of how their heart performs in real life, for example, not just during a 10-second reading in an exam room.

For decades, researchers have known that the heart holds far more information than an ECG can capture in the hospital, but the technology to use that information proactively simply didn’t exist. The signals were there, but we could not reach them easily.

The good news is, technology is finally starting to catch up with the science. Using precise signal processing tools that traditionally only existed in places like NASA and the Department of Defense, we can recreate the 12-lead process of a hospital EKG in a much smaller package. We can then send it home with patients over a longer term to collect clean, detailed cardiac data while someone goes about their day. Finally, the computing and analytic power of AI turns that raw data into clear, actionable insights.

The heart’s clues to whole-body health

When you have days instead of seconds to listen, there is a lot the heart can tell you. Irregular heartbeats and vital signs like body temperature and activity levels offer a starting point, but they only tell part of the story. When we collect richer, longer-term data, we start to see how the heart really behaves in everyday life. And when we have more information, we can make better decisions.

New technology can now:

• Capture complete, high-fidelity signals, recording the full electrical activity of the heart, not just rhythm patterns, to show how the muscle itself is performing.
• Amplify vitally important, yet subtle trends in data that are often thrown away, using advanced signal processing and AI to clean messy, everyday data.
• Connect cardiac data to whole-body health, showing how stress, sleep, and movement affect circulation and recovery over time.
• Compare new data to established patterns to highlight what’s normal for one person versus what may signal change.

These insights help clinicians see how the whole body is functioning, not just whether the heart is failing. Gathering more precise and longer-term heart data helps us map an individual’s overall health.

Rethinking monitoring

Trying to turn homes into hospitals will always fall a little short because homes are not hospitals. The equipment, expertise, and control of a clinical environment will always be the best defense when someone is in acute distress.

But that was never the real promise of remote monitoring. Its greatest value is as an early-warning, preventive system. In conjunction with other tools like glucose monitors, EEG measurements, and even consumer products like an Oura Ring or Whoop device, advanced remote heart monitoring can help to build a non-invasive, digital model of a body’s key vital signs.

The future of RPM isn’t about reacting faster when something goes wrong. It’s about seeing ahead to what might become a problem. Detection, not diagnosis. Making small adjustments before problems turn into emergencies.

It’s time to think differently.

Chris Darland is a health care executive.