The latest Tampa Bay HealthTech Meetup, brought to you by Embarc Collective, TGH Ventures, and the Tampa Medical & Research District, brought together healthcare, technology, and startup leaders to discuss the evolving role of remote patient monitoring (RPM) in improving care delivery beyond the hospital walls.

Hosted by Embarc Collective, the discussion featured Dr. Aman Shah, Physician, Medical Director of TGH’s Centralized Heart Failure Remote Monitoring Program and Advanced Heart Failure, MCS, and Transplant Cardiologist; Richard Crews, Manager of Inpatient Informatics at Tampa General Hospital; and moderator Scott Rein, Founder & CEO of Soteria 360.

Throughout the evening, the panel explored how remote monitoring is shifting healthcare from episodic to more continuous care, the infrastructure required to successfully implement these technologies, and the growing potential for AI and passive monitoring to identify patient risks earlier.

Remote Monitoring Is Moving Toward More Passive, Predictive Care

Remote patient monitoring itself isn’t new. Dr. Shah pointed to invasive technologies that have been used for years to monitor heart failure patients. What’s changing is how much information clinicians can gather without requiring patients to actively interact with a device.

Dr. Shah highlighted emerging technologies that use everyday devices to identify potential health changes, including a clinical trial using an iPhone application to analyze changes in a patient’s voice for signs of fluid overload. TGH is also studying the use of the Oura Ring against implanted devices for heart failure detection. As AI improves the ability to interpret multiple signals simultaneously, the panel sees an opportunity to move from reacting to individual alerts toward predicting deterioration earlier and intervening before a patient needs to return to the hospital.

Successful RPM Requires More Than the Right Technology

For healthtech founders, one of the evening’s clearest messages was that clinical value alone isn’t enough to successfully introduce a new remote monitoring product into a health system.

Dr. Shah identified workflow, appropriate staffing, and patient engagement as three fundamentals of an effective RPM program. Technology must also integrate into the systems clinicians already use. Additional logins, clicks, or disconnected workflows create friction that can quickly undermine adoption. EHR integration through standards like HL7 and FHIR can also become one of the most difficult parts of implementation, requiring coordination across multiple IT teams before a technology ever reaches patients.

The panel encouraged healthtech founders to validate their technology, work directly with clinicians, and demonstrate products in real clinical settings. Ultimately, a successful solution needs to accomplish three things at once: improve clinical outcomes, demonstrate financial viability, and be easy for clinicians and patients to use.

Patient Engagement Can Determine Whether RPM Works

Even the most sophisticated monitoring technology provides little value if patients stop using it. While the panel discussed RPM compliance rates that can fall well below 50%, Dr. Shah shared that his program has achieved approximately a 90% transmission rate by making engagement part of the care model itself.

That starts by setting expectations during the first patient encounter, involving family members and caregivers, showing patients their own data, and reinforcing that clinicians are actively reviewing what they submit. Importantly, the team doesn’t only communicate when something is wrong. Patients also receive positive feedback when their readings are stable, helping them understand that no alert can be good news. Richard Crews added that clinician adoption must come first: if healthcare teams don’t understand why a system matters and use it consistently, they can’t expect patients to do the same.

AI Can Help Healthcare Teams Identify Risk Earlier

The discussion also highlighted the potential for AI to help clinicians move beyond individual data points and identify patterns that may be difficult for humans to recognize alone.

At TGH, AI-driven monitoring has already been applied to sepsis detection. The health system partnered with Palantir to identify patients showing signs of sepsis and surface alerts to a nurse, who can then engage rapid response teams and physicians. According to the panel, TGH’s sepsis mortality rate declined from approximately 15% before implementation to between 5% and 6% after the program began in August 2022, with the team estimating that approximately 1,000 patient lives have been saved since launch.

For Crews, the larger opportunity is to connect intelligence across the entire patient journey. By analyzing patterns from inpatient care through the transition home, health systems may eventually be able to identify population-level trends faster and apply those insights to improve how care is delivered.

The Future of Care Extends Beyond the Hospital

Ultimately, the conversation demonstrated how RPM can help healthcare move from isolated encounters toward a more continuous relationship between patients and their care teams.

For high-risk heart failure patients, that can begin immediately after discharge. Dr. Shah described combining follow-up visits within seven days with wearable monitoring that can begin as soon as a patient returns home. These tools can also bridge the gap while patients wait for insurance approval or placement of more advanced implanted devices.

As remote monitoring technologies become less invasive, more predictive, and more seamlessly integrated into clinical workflows, their potential extends beyond collecting more data. The real opportunity is giving care teams the right information at the right time to intervene earlier, keep patients engaged, and ultimately improve outcomes.

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