Clinical trial research had demonstrated that remote patient monitoring (RPM) of chronic disease status could be an effective tool to achieve better control of blood pressure and blood glucose for some populations, such as participants in clinical trials and affluent patients. However, little was known about the effectiveness of RPM in healthcare delivery settings or in medically underserved populations.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the important role that RPM could play in ensuring continuity of care. It also illustrated the limited infrastructural preparedness of community health centers, which provided care to the most medically underserved patients in the U.S., to offer RPM tools. The proposed study evaluated the implementation of RPM tools in community health centers for patients with hypertension and type 2 diabetes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the biomedical effects of these RPM interventions and gain insights into barriers and facilitators to the implementation and adoption of the programs. The results informed efforts to ensure that patients in community health centers could benefit from digital RPM interventions and laid the foundation for large-scale implementation of such interventions.