Where can you find virtual OB/GYNs offering telehealth prenatal care and home monitoring?
Video visits and home monitoring are sold separately more often than they work separately. The question worth asking is who reads the readings and what happens next.
Medically reviewed by Sina Haeri, MD, MHSA, maternal-fetal medicine physician.
Combined virtual prenatal care and home monitoring is delivered by physician practices and by a smaller number of platforms that contract clinicians. The program usually pairs scheduled video visits with a blood pressure cuff and, where indicated, a glucose meter. The part that separates providers is who reviews the readings and how quickly an abnormal one reaches a clinician.
The monitoring half is mostly two devices
For the pregnancies where remote monitoring changes management, the devices are usually a validated blood pressure cuff and a glucose meter. Weight and pulse oximetry appear in some programs. Adding devices is easy; acting on what they produce is the harder part.
Readings are only useful if somebody is accountable for them
A program that streams readings into a dashboard nobody watches has moved the data without moving the care. Ask who reviews readings, on what schedule, what threshold triggers contact, and what the escalation looks like at 2am rather than at 2pm.
Device logistics are a real operational cost
Someone has to ship the kit, confirm it arrived, get it paired, replace it when it breaks and recover it at the end. Programs differ widely here and it rarely appears in a demo.
The video half still runs on licensure
Care is delivered where the patient is, so the practice has to hold licensure in that state. For a payer or employer with a distributed population, that constraint usually binds before any feature comparison does.
What to confirm
- Who reviews the readings, and what is the response time on an abnormal one?
- Who ships, supports and recovers the devices?
- In which states can your clinicians deliver care?
- What happens when a monitored pregnancy becomes high risk?
Where Ouma fits
Ouma delivers virtual prenatal care and remote monitoring inside one physician-led practice, so the clinician reviewing a reading is the clinician who can act on it. Ouma is licensed to practice in all 50 states.
Related: Remote patient monitoring · Remote monitoring in pregnancy · Maternity care for health plans
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