Thinking about implementing remote patient monitoring? This guide breaks down RPM systems, compares custom vs. ready-made solutions, and helps you choose the right approach for your patients.
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) isn’t just a trend – it’s a complete shift in how medical care is delivered these days. As a result, people can gain insights into their health not only when they visit a hospital but also at home, with the help of connected devices such as wearables, sensors, and medical-grade IoT tools. These devices can continuously track key health metrics (blood pressure, glucose, heart rate) both for personal use and for secure sharing with clinicians in real time.
The result is simple and efficient. It’s a transition from reactive care (“come in when you’re sick”) to proactive care (“we’ll catch it before it escalates”), and the numbers prove that. The global patient remote monitoring software and services market size is forecasted to reach $65.0 billion by 2030 – an impressive number. At the same time, hospitals are also adopting RPM to improve post-surgery outcomes, cut down on readmission penalties, and make smarter use of their limited beds.
Still, both healthcare organizations and entrepreneurs face a strategic decision when deciding to adopt such patient monitoring solutions: either to buy an off-the-shelf platform or invest in custom RPM software development. This article is your roadmap to understanding both options better, comparing pros, cons, and pricing, and eventually finding out the optimal solution for your needs.
The main purpose of a remote hospital patient monitoring system is to deliver continuous, data-driven care outside the clinic. Simply put, this is a permanent digital link between patients and providers.
An effective HRS RPM system consists of these five core elements:
Still, this isn’t all that matters. To work effectively, an RPM system has to seamlessly integrate into the larger healthcare infrastructure:

RPM isn’t one-size-fits-all. Its applications cover multiple areas of care. Here are the most common types of them.
This is the most common use case, which is also one of the most impactful.
For instance, such remote systems help track:
In this case, RPM is used to support safe recovery outside the hospital.
This could be:
RPM pairs health tracking with safety monitoring to help seniors live independently longer. For instance, this can be achieved with the help of smart home sensors that can detect falls, inactivity, or irregular sleep patterns. This grants caregivers peace of mind and gives healthcare teams early warning signs before emergencies occur.
In this case, virtual patient monitoring systems are used by hospitals to extend their reach and offer hospital-level care at home. This can be especially helpful with:
This also often includes:
Many US healthcare providers rely on CMS-defined RPM programs to deliver care and receive reimbursement for monitoring services. CMS remote patient monitoring is built around chronic disease management, but also supports transitional care and preventive programs.
These programs usually include:
We at Phenomenon Studio offer app development for healthcare, including CMS PRM development. The RPM platform below – Genomic – is an example of our work. Turn to us if you’re looking for a similar high-quality solution for your business.
Now you have a better understanding of what exactly an RPM is, its types, and components. Let’s move on to exploring the benefits of such software.
Remote patient monitoring is a new standard for managing chronic conditions at home. Still, before things like wireless patient monitoring systems became a new norm, telemetric surveillance was already setting the stage inside hospitals. It’s the traditional model for continuous, real-time cardiac surveillance. Understanding it helps clarify what true RPM should (and shouldn’t) be.
Telemetry automatically sends a patient’s physiological data to a central station where nurses or technicians observe it in real time. Its core purpose is primarily cardiac monitoring: ECG/EKG waveforms, rhythm, and sometimes blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and respiratory rate.
In fact, telemetry shapes how modern patient video monitoring systems and RPMs are built. Decades of telemetry alert rules help define accurate thresholds and CDS logic in RPM, especially for virtual patient surveillance. Custom RPM solutions these days often borrow telemetry-grade requirements to ensure any cardiac data integration is secure, reliable, and clinically exact.
Still, shaping technology is one thing. The other is what benefits does this new technology bring? Let’s figure this out, focusing on both sides: patients and healthcare providers.
Let’s break it down: remote hospital patient monitoring systems change the care experience on both sides. Patients get more clarity and independence, and healthcare providers get better efficiency, smoother workflows, and predictable financial outcomes. Here’s how it works for each of them.
RPM puts patients in the center of their care journey. They are no longer just recipients – instead, they become active participants. It makes daily management easier, interventions earlier, and the overall experience more reassuring.
The main benefit is more confidence and less stress. Connected devices show what’s happening now, not months later. This grants patients a sense of control over their health. Furthermore, continuous patient monitoring and automatic alerts remove the fear of “what if something happens and no one notices?” This can be especially reassuring for patients with cardiac or respiratory conditions.
Older adults also benefit from RPM and patient video monitoring systems. Such devices can monitor falls, inactivity, and irregular patterns, alerting them and their families.
This is the case of MyWisdom, a digital platform aimed at older adults. Phenomenon Studio redesigned the mobile part of the platform. We made the interface easy to use, calm to navigate, and clear to understand, especially for older adults.

In addition, remote patient monitoring systems remove friction from care plans and make it easier for people to stay consistent with their health goals. Seeing real improvements (or early warnings) encourages healthier habits. And as devices handle all the logging (vitals, symptoms, meds, reminders) and give timely, personalized feedback, it becomes even more helpful and simple for patients.
Last but not least, remote hospital patient monitoring systems help save patients money and improve their experience with healthcare. They offer regular real-time visibility and therefore allow to avoid ER visits and hospital stays, which could be quite costly.
Remote patient monitoring can become a strategic solution for providers, helping them achieve financial sustainability, operational efficiency, and modern care delivery.
Let’s start with the most important part – finances and risk management. First, HRS RPM directly strengthens the financial foundation of a healthcare organization as it helps reduce CMS readmission penalties. Second, it grants teams the continuous data they need to prove outcomes, meet quality metrics, and maximize shared savings. Furthermore, automated analysis helps clinicians instantly identify high-risk patients, so time and resources go where they matter most.
Remote hospital patient monitoring systems also help medical teams work smarter, not harder. Intelligent alerts filter out the noise, so care teams can focus on meaningful interventions instead of reviewing endless streams of normal data. Virtual and video patient monitoring allows patients to safely receive acute-level care at home. This, in turn, frees hospital beds for the most critical cases without costly infrastructure expansion. Custom RPM platforms can also track all CMS requirements, helping reduce admin burden.
What do you do if you need a remote patient monitoring system? There are generally two options: you can either pick a ready-made one or opt for a custom-built platform. No matter which options you choose, you’ll be able to launch an RPM program. So what’s the difference? It mostly lies in the long-term impact on scalability, compliance, and innovation.
Let’s explore both options and unpack their pros and cons.

Ready-made or off-the-shelf remote patient monitoring systems are a pre-built solution, which is sold to multiple healthcare providers under a licensing model. It’s often the quickest way to enter the RPM market, which makes it the most appealing option to some.
True, ready-made remote patient monitoring solutions have lots of benefits. They are already built and tested, so you don’t need to look for a development team or wait until the build cycles finish. They are also budget-friendly as most such products run on a subscription as a service (SaaS) model with predictable monthly or per-patient fees. Last but not least, they come with all the necessary certifications and are compliant with regulations.
Sounds great? Most likely. However, an off-the-shelf software can still become a long-term bottleneck, especially if your company plans to scale or values flexibility.
Why so? Because such systems are built for the “average” clinic, not your specific case. It might not seem critical, but it can create daily friction. For instance, the dashboards can look cluttered – there will be too many extra metrics and unused modules that you cannot remove. The alerts probably also won’t be very flexible, and you won’t be able to fine-tune them for different patient types (a heart-failure patient that requires telemetry patient monitoring isn’t the same as a diabetic one).
The potential cons can also include integration friction. You may need proprietary connectors or paid middleware to sync with systems like Epic or Cerner. What’s more, any future EHR update can break the integration and pause your data flow. In this case, you’ll just have to wait until the vendor fixes it.
And that’s not the only situation in which you’ll depend on a vendor. In any case, you’ll scale on their terms, not yours, which could lead to rising costs and slow innovation (whenever you want to add a new device, you’ll have to wait until your vendor supports it).
The last con is data ownership and access to data. When you’re working with ready-made video patient monitoring software, all the data lives on the vendor’s service. Although technically you own it, it can be difficult, slow, and expensive to extract it for research, analytics, or integration (if permitted at all).
The hidden cost of vendor lock-in: In the first nine months of 2025, 293 ransomware attacks were launched on hospitals, clinics, and other direct care providers. This is itself unsettling, but it can become even more critical in case your RPM operations depend entirely on an external platform. If a vendor outage or breach happens, it won’t simply disrupt your tech but also halt patient care.
Simply put, when an RPM software provider goes down, all patient remote monitoring stops. This means you won’t receive patient data and important alerts, which is the single point of failure that no health organization can afford. The longer you stay within a closed vendor ecosystem, the more difficult (and expensive) it becomes to regain control of your data, your workflows, and ultimately, your patient outcomes.
Now, let’s move on to the pros and cons of custom RPM software to help you make the optimal choice.
Building a custom RPM platform can become a strategic investment in long-term control, scalability, and differentiation of your future software. In this case, you won’t be renting someone else’s vision – you’ll be creating your own clinical-grade digital product. Still, like any big decision, it comes with real advantages and real challenges.
Custom RPM solutions pay off in four areas that matter most: workflow efficiency, growth potential, interoperability, and data ownership. It is designed for your real workflow, which means the dashboard mirrors your triage logic, alert routing, escalation paths, and documentation habits, and also offers a patient-first UX experience. This, in turn, helps your staff save time and leads to higher adoption.
One of the examples of high-quality workflow-tailored custom RPM software Phenomenon Studio has made for our clients is Healher, an app that works with the company’s smart wristband and helps people who spend many hours a day in front of a computer.

We’ve created an app that recommends a visit to a particular doctor, the types of activities that should be included in the daily activities list, and those that are best avoided, helping users with a sedentary lifestyle to improve their health.
Having a custom patient remote monitoring system also means you’ll be able to keep your long-term financials predictable. Growth won’t lead to higher licensing costs, and your cost per patient drops as the program expands. Furthermore, you’ll be able to add new sensors, custom algorithms, AI models, or clinical pathways whenever you want, without waiting for vendor updates.
Custom RPM systems also grant you complete control over data and security, which is especially important if you’re working with a patient tracking system in a hospital or other healthcare institution that handles sensitive data. All data sits in your private cloud with unrestricted access, and all the compliance is tailored to your exact operational and legal needs.
Of course, just like ready-made software, a custom one also has its cons and might not be for everyone. The first challenge is a significant upfront investment. SaaS platforms spread their costs over monthly fees, but custom development requires capital up front. This, in turn, can be a barrier for smaller clinics or early-stage teams needing immediate traction.
Custom software also requires more time to design, build, test, certify, and deploy. It grants you full ownership over the product, but this also means that you’ll have full accountability. Outages, bugs, and security patches become your responsibility, as well as operational costs and updates.
To create high-quality RPM software, you need to find the right experts. You’ll need access to talent skilled in:
– medical device integrations (Bluetooth SDKs, BLE protocols, etc.)
– HIPAA/GDPR architecture
– risk management and clinical workflow mapping
– scalable healthcare cloud infrastructure
This is often why many organizations partner with full-cycle development remote patient monitoring companies instead of building internal teams from scratch.
Pricing is always one of the main concerns and blockers for those who want to explore custom RPM software development, so let’s address it. How much does the development cost? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but still, understanding typical pricing structures can help you plan strategically and avoid surprises later on.
The total sum usually depends on your project’s scope, level of integration, and compliance requirements. It can start with $25,000 for MVP or prototype and reach $300,000+ for advanced systems (such as IoT and AI-powered devices).
The development phase also matters: some are more pricey than others.

Complexity, integrations, and compliance depth are the three biggest cost drivers in any RPM project. Let’s focus on each of them.
Usually, when you want to add a machine learning component, such as AI, this can add $40,000–$100,000+ to the total development costs, depending on data readiness and model sophistication. IoT device integration can also be pricey. While supporting one or two common devices is quite straightforward, if you decide to add multiple manufacturers or device types, this will increase engineering and testing requirements, leading to higher costs.
When it comes to EHR integration, one-way data exchange is generally fast and affordable. Full bidirectional FHIR-based integration with Epic or Cerner can be more complicated but unlocks immense value for care teams. The same goes for CPT tracking, claims, or insurance platforms – they help make reimbursement more accurate but require additional API development.
Although regulations can differ from one country to another, there are several common options we want to cover.
In case of HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 13485 compliance, you’ll need specialized teams and higher QA standards, which will increase the price. The same goes for FDA/CE certification: if your solution qualifies as a medical device (SaMD), its verification and documentation can extend both timelines and budgets.
Although the prices might seem significant, there’s a straightforward way to reduce the costs (as well as minimize the risk): turn to a full-cycle product development company. Read further to discover how it can benefit you.
Building a regulated medical product like a remote patient monitoring system is never just about writing code. You need a structured, end-to-end strategy that covers compliance, scalability, and long-term support. That’s exactly what a full-cycle product development process delivers: a methodical, transparent path from concept to post-launch optimization that reduces risk and helps you control costs at every stage.
No project is the same, so the development stages can differ. Still, usually it consists of six stages, which a full-cycle product development company manages internally, maintaining full visibility and compliance control from start to finish:
Here’s an example timeline for a custom RPM project you can expect from our team:

Why full-cycle matters: Owning the entire development lifecycle gives both you and developers an advantage that many teams miss – consistency. There is no lost context, no vendor gaps, no compliance slip-ups.
In-house teams (designers, developers, QA engineers, and product managers) work side by side. Due to that, every requirement stays aligned from day one. The iteration also becomes faster due to agile sprints and direct communication.
Furthermore, as compliance experts and QA are involved from the start, it allows the team to embed HIPAA, HITECH, MDR, and FDA standards directly into the product. That means fewer late-stage surprises and no expensive rework.
Phenomenon Studio can be your trustworthy partner in RPM software development. We’ve delivered high-quality healthcare platforms like the diabetes app Glume, recognized by Clutch and other independent reviewers for both technical excellence and reliability in regulated spaces.

So, if you’re looking for a development partner who can guide you through every phase from concept validation to compliance and growth, we’d love to help shape your RPM solution.
Building a successful RPM platform is never about flashy features. Instead, it’s about balancing innovation with strict healthcare regulations, and that’s where the challenge often lies.
Many projects stumble by prioritizing bells and whistles over core safety, compliance, and usability. Learning about these common mistakes will help you avoid them and launch a scalable, reimbursable, and clinically effective platform.
These main mistakes are the following:
Consumer-grade trackers or smartwatches can be helpful for overall health monitoring. However, they should be clinically validated to be used as medical devices in healthcare organizations.
Here’s why:
Some apps are tailored to patients’ experience and ignore the dashboard for healthcare staff. This, however, is a quick way to kill adoption. If the dashboards are cluttered, clinicians can spend hours working with their data. Furthermore, constant alerts can lead to alert fatigue, which makes staff more likely to miss critical events.
That’s why it’s important to design with real clinical workflows in mind if you’re making an app that will be used by both patients and clinicians. Intelligent dashboards prioritize alerts, highlight anomalies, and surface relevant patient history in a few clicks.
Compliance can’t be “added on” at the last minute. Integrating audit logs, secure data pipelines, or encrypted storage late in development is expensive and risky.
Regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, or regional equivalents inform every design decision, from multi-factor authentication to data access policies. That’s why embedding compliance in the early stages helps ensure the security and privacy of an app.
In 2024, around 35% of small organizations believed their cyber resilience was inadequate. This can be especially dangerous for RPM platforms that handle sensitive patient information. For instance, patient tracking systems in hospitals. Any breach can result in massive HIPAA fines, reputational damage, and patient harm.
That’s why it’s essential to implement layered security, run penetration tests, and vulnerability scans to catch weaknesses before they become problems.
A remote patient monitoring system is basically a mix of hardware and software that needs ongoing care. Such devices require updates, troubleshooting, and calibration. Ignoring this leads to operational chaos and interrupted care.
That’s why robust platforms these days often include a device management module that allows tracking device ID, battery life, last transmission, and software version. This helps the development team resolve issues proactively.
Will your remote hospital patient monitoring system be truly effective and useful? This depends not only on its idea and technology, but also on who builds it. That’s why choosing the right development partner is an important strategic decision. The right team can make sure your solution turns out to be innovative, clinically safe, and fully compliant from day one.
A strong partner goes beyond coding. They understand healthcare, compliance, and clinical workflows.
First of all, your chosen development partner should have proven experience building medical or health software. They need to deeply understand HIPAA, GDPR, and quality management standards like ISO 13485 and IEC 62304. Compliance shouldn’t be an afterthought and has to be embedded in the architecture.
As RPM is all about people (both patients and clinicians), you need to look for teams that include UX/UI designers experienced in clinical workflows. This can help reduce the number of unnecessary alerts and focus on those features that help improve adoption. Combined with the support of backend engineers who can build secure, scalable device integration pipelines, this can result in high-quality products built with an understanding of the target audience.
Verified results also matter. You have to ask for case studies that show measurable impact, such as reduced readmissions, efficiency gains for staff, and other things. Independent validation, like top ratings on Clutch, also matters as it adds extra confidence.
Partners that take a full-cycle approach are able to own the process from concept to scale. This can help you align your business, technical, and medical goals.
For instance, a full-cycle development company understands your reimbursement strategy and patient population. This helps the company build features that drive real ROI. They also help translate clinical requirements into a secure, compliant, and scalable architecture.
And let’s not forget about the clinical oversight, which is integrated throughout. Due to this, the solution improves outcomes, not just collects data. Operating across all these three dimensions guarantees that your RPM platform will be commercially viable, legally compliant, and clinically effective.
We at Phenomenon Studio are a team of top-performers who leverage their expertise in business analysis, UI/UX design, and development to build products that ‘wow’ users. We’ve been working with international clients for 5+ years already, and through that time we’ve built a lean, expert team that thrives on speed, clarity, and measurable impact.
Projects like CuraNet – our telemedicine platform that brings together patients, doctors, and insurers through secure video consultations and unified care management – showcase how we turn complex healthcare challenges into intuitive digital experiences.

Our mission is to help fast-moving healthcare startups and remote patient monitoring companies turn ideas into well-crafted, user-loved products.
To turn your RPM concept into a compliant, patient-focused reality, reach out today to Phenomenon Studio to schedule a strategy session. We’ll explore your goals, demonstrate our certified development process, and show how your RPM solution can deliver measurable outcomes.
Remote patient monitoring isn’t just another health tech trend. It’s a real shift toward proactive, continuous patient monitoring. And as the market moves toward a projected $65B valuation by 2030, every healthcare organization faces the same strategic question: which path will actually support sustainable growth, better outcomes, and long-term financial stability?
Ready-made RPM platforms definitely have their strengths. They’re quick to launch, budget-friendly at the beginning, and great for simple use cases or early-stage pilots. But once you move beyond the basics, their limitations become obvious. Rising subscription costs, rigid workflows, and vendor lock-in can slow you down just when you need flexibility the most.
Custom RPM, on the other hand, requires a bigger upfront investment, but it pays off by giving you something far more valuable: a platform that fits your workflows, integrates cleanly with your EHR, and lets you fully own your data. Furthermore, you’ll be able to scale your system on your own terms, add advanced features like AI predictions, and grow without being tied to someone else’s roadmap. It’s an investment in autonomy, long-term savings, and clinical precision.
In fact, both options come with risk. The question is which risk you’re willing to take.
Ready-made RPM carries business risk: unpredictable long-term costs, limited customization, and dependency on a single provider. Custom RPM, in turn, carries execution risk: it requires the right team, the right process, and the right compliance expertise.
That’s where a full-cycle partner like Phenomenon Studio comes in to change the equation. Our development process is built around regulatory confidence (HIPAA, CMS, ISO standards) and deep healthcare UX, so you’re not guessing or hoping things “just work out.”
We help you avoid the pitfalls that often derail RPM projects: weak alert logic, clinician overload, fragmented data, or security gaps. Instead, you get a clear, predictable roadmap and a platform that’s genuinely ready for clinical use.
Don’t let your RPM vision be limited by someone else’s technology decisions. Take ownership of your data, your costs, and your long-term strategy.
If you’re ready to build an RPM solution shaped around your patients and your clinical goals, let’s talk. We’d be happy to help turn that vision into a working, scalable reality.