How to Evaluate RPM Vendors: 10 Questions to Ask

The remote monitoring market has grown crowded, and demo-stage products can look remarkably alike. The differences that matter show up in month six — in alert volumes, billing audits, staff adoption, and support responsiveness. These ten questions surface those differences before you sign.

The checklist

• 1. Is the sensing hardware FDA-cleared? Clearance separates clinical-grade measurement from wellness gadgets, and your medical director will ask.
• 2. What must residents wear, charge, or do? Every device a resident must tolerate is a compliance failure waiting to happen — especially in memory care. Ambient, room-based sensing removes the failure mode entirely.
• 3. How are alert thresholds set — population defaults or per-resident baselines? This single design choice largely determines whether your nurses trust the system or silence it. Ask what percentage of alerts at reference sites led to clinical action.
• 4. Who receives alerts, and how is escalation configured? The answer should reference your workflow — charge nurse, DON, on-call — not a generic dashboard someone must remember to check.
• 5. Does data flow into our EHR automatically? Native integration with your actual EHR (in long-term care, usually PointClickCare) is the difference between one record and two.
• 6. What does the billing documentation look like? Ask to see the actual export for a billable RPM month: data days, clinical minutes, review records. If they show slides instead of records, note that.
• 7. Who runs implementation, and how long until fully live? Listen for a named team, a facility assessment, and staff training — measured in days, not quarters.
• 8. Where does resident data live, and under what agreement? A BAA is table stakes; encrypted, access-controlled, audit-logged storage should be the default answer, not a special request.
• 9. What happens after go-live? Threshold tuning in the first 30 days, a named support contact, and periodic program reviews separate partners from device shippers.
• 10. Can we speak to a facility like ours? A reference running the platform at your acuity level, on your EHR, for a year or more is worth every slide in the deck.

Weighing the answers

No vendor aces all ten for every facility type — the goal is to see where each one's honest strengths lie and whether those match your environment. A vendor that answers billing and workflow questions with specifics, names its hardware clearances without hedging, and offers references unprompted is telling you what year two will feel like.