Most clinicians are forced to manage chronic diseases with just a few data points a year. Dr. Lucienne Ide, a physician-turned-CEO, founded Rimidi to change that.
In this insightful conversation from HLTH 2025, Dr. Ide shares her journey from the exam room to the C-suite and explains how her company is making remote patient monitoring (RPM) a seamless, equitable, and financially sustainable standard of care.
Listen to learn why a clinician-first approach is critical for technology adoption, how new reimbursement models are unlocking access to remote care, and what the future of connected health—from CGM to ambient monitoring—truly looks like.
Learn more about Rimidi’s work in chronic care management at rimidi.com.
Introduction
Dr. Tim Showalter: Welcome back to HealthTech Remedy. This is another episode recorded live at HLTH 2025. On the show, we explore how technology and leadership are transforming care delivery. I'm pleased to be joined today by Dr. Lucienne Ide, founder and CEO of Rimidi, a digital health company helping providers deliver connected, continuous care for chronic disease management.
And just for confirmation, Rimidi is spelled R-I-M-I-D-I for those who are interested in learning more. Rimidi’s platform combines remote patient monitoring, chronic care management, and electronic health record integration to turn data from connected devices into actionable insights for care teams. And Lucy brings a unique dual perspective as a clinician turned CEO, blending bedside experience with deep tech and policy know-how. Lucy, welcome to HealthTech Remedy. It's great to have you with us here at HLTH.
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Dr. Tim Showalter: For our listeners, again, a reminder, we're recording this live at HLTH. Thankfully, I think we'll post-process the audio and it should be good, but please forgive us for the audio quality. I'd love to kick off the discussion before we get into what Rimidi’s up to, to hear about your own career journey and what led you to founding this company.
From Clinician to CEO: Dr. Lucienne Ide’s Journey to Founding Rimidi
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Sure. I actually started my career in tech, working for the government, and then worked a bit in venture capital, but really a scientist at heart. I decided to go to medical school and thought I would be an academic clinician, did a dual MD-PhD, went and did a residency in OB-GYN, and had the, I guess, great fortune of living through the paper to electronic health record transition in two major health systems within three years.
I think I did 11 or 12 go-lives in three years—children's hospital, main hospital, inpatient, outpatient. And was a bit shocked and frustrated with the experience that delivered, as I think a lot of clinicians were at the time.
And I thought that we could deliver better technology to support clinicians with what my expectation had been, which is these systems will digitize data and they'll overlay insights and they'll help me make better decisions about patient care, which was not the case. I went back to venture capital to look at emerging health technologies and realized there was an opportunity to bring that first-line healthcare experience to founding a company because I looked at a lot of technologies who didn't necessarily understand the problem they were trying to solve.
I became interested in longitudinal care, chronic disease management, how do we support patients between visits, and how are we as clinicians expected to manage a chronic condition with two data points a year? That was the origin of Rimidi, initially focused on diabetes management, and then we've brought it out to more chronic disease work.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I think that's a really interesting profile for a CEO in this space because before, even before your clinical background, you had a sense of what the investment landscape looked like, how to put a business together and the technology side. And then out of your clinical experience and obviously research experience as well, and then came back into this role.
And I think patients and physicians alike have lived a lot of the disconnected aspects that you talk about. And I always think about when you see a patient in that exam room for their twice-a-year visit and you refer to the two data points a year for a chronic condition, you're usually seeing the best-case scenario. Someone who's worried about their weight might have even lost a few pounds before that visit. And you're always seeing them the most buffed up as possible.
I think I read somewhere that there is a, in terms of the taglines associated with Rimidi, there's a bit of a for us, by us angle. I think I read 'Created by Doctors for Doctors.' And I think that says a lot. Can you describe a little bit more about how the clinical foundation and the fact that you're in the leadership role as a clinician, driving the product-development and the company? How does that influence how Rimidi designs its workflows and assesses impact of interventions?
A Clinician-First Approach to Improving Patient Outcomes and Efficiency
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Great question. I frequently bring my team back to two things. One is the North Star is improving patient outcomes. That is why we are all in this business. And I'm sure we'll talk later about remote patient monitoring and I'll come back to that because I think it's something being missed in the market and it's really important.
But the second thing is, it's all about workflow. And some of my early customers really helped solidify that for me. I don't need you to necessarily help me be better. I need you to help me be more efficient. And your software may be great, but if it adds five minutes per patient visit, I can't do it.
And I think that just constantly bringing empathy to our customer and saying, I'll frequently say, because these doctors and nurses want to make their kids soccer game. They want to be home for dinner. There's this human element that we forget about clinicians that they have a life outside of their job. I think that is a differentiator of the perspective that I and several of our team members bring.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's a great point. I think you hit the nail on the head already leading in with things have to improve outcomes for patients. But also, I do think there's this argument where improving the process for clinicians ultimately improves health care as well. Everything is so hard. And I love your point about people want to make their kids soccer games and get home for dinner because healthcare providers are living every single day in that environment.
I know a big focus has been remote patient monitoring right now. And could you start maybe for our listeners giving a little bit of a perspective of how widespread remote patient monitoring is and what's really driving the broad adoption across health systems?
The Rise of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) as the New Standard of Care
Dr. Lucienne Ide: This has been a big topic this week in conversations at HLTH because we have definitely reached a moment of market maturity. And there are all sorts of different studies that 85 percent of practices are doing something or 40 percent are and 35 percent will in the next few years. We're there, where I'm no longer explaining to health systems or clinicians what this is, because I've lived that life for the past couple of years, that in order to sell a solution, I first had to explain to them what the concept was.
I think we've reached the moment of market maturity when this becomes standard of care. And we will stop referring to it as a separate thing, except for the billing code aspect. But we'll look back and say, how else would you manage a chronic condition like hypertension or diabetes if you did not know what was happening with that patient when they are not in your office? And to your point, they show up in the office maybe a little thinner, a little bit more teed up, a little bit more adherent to their diet, whatever it might be.
And we're not doing them any service if that's all we know about them. And that's the conversation we're having with practices, with large health systems, is either, 'Okay, I'm embarrassed that we're not doing this yet as part of our practice because I know it has shown benefit and I know it would help our patients.' Or, 'We've been tinkering around with little pockets of this and pilot activities, and it now needs to be an enterprise strategy.'
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. That makes a lot of sense. And it really, if you step back and think about it, it doesn't make sense to manage chronic conditions with episodic, brief glimpses of what outpatients are doing. Can you explain a little bit more about the barriers? I'm thinking about technology and the classic healthcare things around EHR integrations, device connectivity, all the workflow challenges you already alluded to. What's so hard for health systems in terms of enterprise-level solutions? And maybe you could go straight to how Rimidi solves those too.
Overcoming Barriers to Enterprise-Level RPM Adoption
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Sure. There's a lot in that. But I think it goes back to our earlier discussion of we have to make this easier for people. We have to make it easier for clinicians and we have to make it easier for patients as well. On the patient aspect of remote monitoring and the device connectivity that you mentioned, my learning of doing this for over a decade—I started the company 13 years ago—we've had the experience of trying every connected medical device that's come to market for that period of time.
And they've gotten better and cheaper and more accessible and more reliable. But my joke I often say is you have an older patient who has a chronic disease who isn't well managed and their doctor suggests they do this and they're not 100% thrilled about it but they know that they need to because they want to get better. And then you give them a device that needs to pair via Bluetooth to a smartphone that maybe they only use to make phone calls and they have a little friction in that experience and you're going to lose them because they aren't necessarily invested in being frustrated every day by this thing that their clinician asked them to do.
That's all to say, we have come to this common denominator of accessibility and user experience, which is give them devices with built-in cellular connectivity. They just take their blood pressure. Automagically ends up in their clinician's EMR and use text messaging. Nobody wants any more apps on their phone. We're done there. That's the learning on the patient side. Make it as easy and as possible and remove as much friction.
It's the same story on the clinician side. This has to be part of their workflow and their existing EMR as much as possible. And I will tell my team, I don't care if our users don't know who we are and they think it's a new feature that Epic rolled out or Athena rolled out—that would be a win because that means that we are removing friction from that experience. It has to be single sign-on. There has to be two-way data exchange.
And then at the institutional level, there's that governance level of friction. It's hard for these big health systems to bring in more vendors and third parties. We've adopted the strategy around 2015-16. As a lot of progress was made with interoperability, we have to be in the marketplace for all these EMRs and invest ourselves in taking as much of that burden as we can off the health system. We have to invest in all the cybersecurity. We have to check as many of their boxes as we can to de-risk the decision to bring in another vendor.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's amazing. And I think it can be summarized as health care is really hard and you got to make it straightforward. I think it's obvious you're a clinician and you understand how life is in a hospital. But even these few seconds of extra clicking or accessing a different system can be a huge bottleneck. You just have to make it completely seamless.
I want to also make sure to give a little bit of airtime to the other aspect of making sure that technology is implemented in a way that works for the health system, and that's on the reimbursement side. I know there have been some evolving changes with respect to the physician fee schedule and opportunities for reimbursement for remote patient monitoring and based on billing code updates. What does this mean for providers and patients in terms of access to remote patient monitoring?
Navigating the Evolving Landscape of RPM Reimbursement and Billing Codes
Dr. Lucienne Ide: These RPM codes first rolled out in 2019. And I think an important thing is that Medicare has been very consistent. They've built on it. They've addressed issues that they've identified with the codes and made slight modifications year on year in the physician fee schedule. And what they're doing this year was signaled last year by the AMA CPT body that there were two artificially determined thresholds historically in RPM. You had to have 16 days of readings out of every 30-day period, meaning a patient more or less had to use their device every other day minimum to get reimbursed for that code. And then you had to do 20 minutes of monitoring for that patient to get reimbursed for a second code.
Historically, why did they come up with 16 days and 20 minutes? There's history there. It doesn't matter. But what I think they identified is maybe not every patient needs to take a measurement every second day. There are patients who were being left out of the opportunity to be engaged through these programs because of that threshold. And maybe not every patient needs 20 minutes of monitoring every month. And this binary aspect of you can't deliver care you're not compensated for was creating a lot of friction in the market.
They're introducing two new codes. One that will compensate for two to 15 days of readings and the other that will compensate for 10 to 19 minutes of monitoring. I think they're going to achieve two things. One is hopefully open this up to a broader patient population who can benefit from the program. Two, I think CMS is going to look at all the data and say how many patients are getting billed under these new codes versus the prior codes. And ultimately, they want to tie that to outcomes. Are there better outcomes above 20 minutes of monitoring that we don't see below that?
They signaled that in some of their OIG reports they've done over the past two years on RPM. But what I appreciate is they're giving it time to year-on-year build on the program, collect more data, look at the data, look at the outcomes, because it's hard for practices if the physician fee schedule changes dramatically year-on-year.
Dr. Tim Showalter: This obviously sounds like it's added some complexity to this. Is it a net win in terms of patient access and sustainability of remote patient monitoring as a service that will be growing? Or is some of this complexity going to be presented as a challenge?
Dr. Lucienne Ide: I think it's a net win. I think it offers, because as I mentioned earlier, RPM is becoming part of standard of care. People want to offer it equally to all of the patients they think could benefit from it, but it needs to be financially sustainable. You need these reimbursement models to line up to actual real-life patient behavior that you can't 100% control.
If you have a patient who only measures 14 days in a month and you can bill nothing for that, that's really hard for a practice. And this gives them some downside risk protection, gives them a buffer. Yes, there's complexity and change. And I think companies like ours need to shield the practice from that as much as possible. We're doing all day analytics to figure out which code a patient qualifies for and trying to handle as much of that workflow for them as we can.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. Thank you. And as I think about these challenges for monitoring and handling data, one of the things I'm wondering about is how it goes for continuous glucose monitoring. Because you see people wearing these all the time, and I imagine they output a ton of data. And what's that look like in terms of scaling that at the remote patient monitoring level?
Scaling Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) for Primary Care
Dr. Lucienne Ide: CGM has been a hot topic as coverage is expanding. That's why we're seeing it as CMS and then the other payers have expanded who qualifies to have a continuous glucose monitor. And we're in this period of moving from type 1 diabetes and endocrinology to type 2 diabetes in primary care. And it's a totally different workflow.
Endocrinology has longer appointments. They have more office staff in order to deal with all of the devices that that community has leveraged for years and decades now that primary care doesn't have that infrastructure to deal with downloading data in the office and analyzing data and getting compensated for that in the 15-minute primary care visit. It has put some pressure on the workflow issue of how do we bring this data into their workflow at a level that is feasible and impactful?
It can't be the every five-minute glucose reading. It's the time in range, time in target range, risk of hypoglycemia, GMI, which is the measure equivalent to hemoglobin A1C. And helping primary care and OBGYN, high-risk pregnancy, whoever it might be, to use that metadata around the CGM devices to risk stratify and identify patients who are not meeting goal. That's one step removed probably from where the endocrinology team is really digging into that intraday behavior and optimization. We've got to serve up the data to say, 'Okay, I have 2,000 patients on CGM. Who's not doing well?' That's the first question.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's fascinating. You're summarizing it and giving these really impactful measures that can be looked at at a quick glance or dashboard level. Is that right?
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Yeah, because it becomes much more of a population management game. Then I'm going to double-click on that patient and I'm going to be able to see what their patterns are, what their issues are, what clinical decision I'm going to make or lifestyle recommendation I'm going to make to help them improve their outcome. But first, I need to know who that patient is that needs the time and attention.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's amazing to see that deployed at the scale of a full clinic like that. I'm curious. There's a lot of outcomes that I can imagine being really impactful for health care. There's all these chronic diseases: type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lots of chronic conditions. For, say, clinicians or for folks who are just health care consumers and interested in remote patient monitoring, what would you summarize in your clinical mind as the most impactful outcomes that you see? What's the pitch for RPM? What's the most compelling example for this?
The Clinical Impact of RPM: Improving Outcomes and Patient Engagement
Dr. Lucienne Ide: I'm super glad you came back to this question because coming off of talking about reimbursement, I am always telling clinicians this is a double win. You can get reimbursed to do an activity that's going to improve the outcome that then may circle back to financials because you're trying to improve maybe your HEDIS measures or your STAR measures. It is the sweet spot of the overlap of those two conversations.
But absolutely, you can move the needle on blood pressure control. We have data, a lot of other folks have shared and published that data of being able to see, again, beyond the two data points in the clinic, what's really going on with that individual and more proactively manage medications and titrate medications, and get that patient a goal sooner. I think one thing RPM facilitates is urgency. Instead of feeling stuck as a clinician—absolutely the clinician and the patient share the goal of getting the patient's blood pressure under control, most likely. But it's hard to iterate on something that you have such a long lag time before you know what the outcome was. I write a new prescription, I see them back in a year, and I say, how did that go? This shortens that cycle.
And then the second one that one of our customers shared some great data with us on is acute utilizations: ER visits, inpatient hospitalizations around diabetes care and rehospitalization. And one aspect of their data that was so interesting was a huge effect: zero readmissions while being monitored for diabetes care and a dramatic decrease in inpatient admissions. But then a tail effect of once they stop monitoring actively, those patients still benefited. You had long-term control that lived past the active monitoring phase. And I think that's what we all need to see.
Dr. Tim Showalter: And is the hypothesis that that's the permanent effects of getting them into the right zone? Or is this behavioral modification, that people actually respond to that?
Dr. Lucienne Ide: I think it's both. I think it's really empowering to the patient to change the experience from, 'I'm a super engaged patient, and I'm reaching out to my practice because I'm not thinking that my glucose numbers are where they should be. I'm sending a portal message. I'm leaving a voicemail. I'm playing that game now. Is someone going to message me back?' And flipping the script on that to someone from the clinic calls the patient and says, 'We're looking at your numbers. And after we saw you last week and we changed your prescription, it doesn't look like that's really working. Let's make another change.'
That blows patients' minds when that happens. Because for the first time, it's an inbound communication to them. And I think that then builds this self-efficacy for the patient. They feel more engaged. They understand the importance of being adherent to their medication, the importance of testing and having that feedback loop of how am I actually doing? I think it's both. It's getting someone to goal and getting them on the right regimen. And it's the patient education and engagement that drives that long-term benefit.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's a powerful change to the way healthcare is delivered in a sense. And just to reflect on that, there are so many things that enabled this, obviously, the technology stack and the devices that monitor things. But the reimbursement code is also a part of that. I think the ability for providers to be able to bill for that, because otherwise, the reality is that in health care, they're going to be in clinic and they're only going to be able to have time for their twice-a-year visit.
It's really powerful. This to me makes perfect logical sense. As a physician, I'm not a primary care doc, but I do have the experience of following up cancer patients. And I know that I'm seeing them on their best behavior for each of those visits. I guess one of the follow-up questions is what are your thoughts about making sure that there's some equity in terms of access to these devices? I think I read somewhere that you've done some partnerships with the Federally Qualified Health Center as well. Can you give us a little bit more information about how you're thinking about using technology and services to enhance equity?
Enhancing Health Equity in Remote Care for FQHCs and Diverse Populations
Dr. Lucienne Ide: We do a lot of work with federally qualified health centers. And the data shows that patients who are generally served by FQHCs and rural health centers tend to have higher rates of chronic conditions than the general population. They also tend to have issues accessing care. And for years, there was actually a carve out where FQHCs couldn't bill for RPM. It was considered to be part of their global payment and there wasn't separate payment. That got resolved in 2024 for Medicare patients.
And I went and did a lot of lobbying on this issue and we would say, 'This is addressing the exact issues in this patient population. Why am I not able, why am I not coming to see the clinician about my hypertension? Well, maybe I don't have paid time off of work. Maybe I don't have transportation. Maybe I don't have child care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.' And bringing health care to that patient instead of requiring that they come to the clinic to get care makes all the sense in the world.
It's really helped that Medicare made that change that FQHCs could deliver RPM and be reimbursed for it. The first year in 2024, it was a different reimbursement code and modality, and they realized that just confused everybody. And they've now aligned it to the exact same CPT codes and created equity at the reimbursement level, which is the first step that needed to happen.
And there are other nuances to this that we have seen—simple things. But we will text message a lot with patients, as I mentioned, because that seems to be the common denominator of accessibility. You get around 'What model phone do you have?' and 'Do you have a data plan on your phone?' There are things very simple like this, but that created barriers to equitable access to technology.
Then we, through one of our partners at Boston Medical Center, where we've worked for about five years, started automatically messaging patients whose data was out of range in their native language that we pulled from Epic. And patients said that really made a difference to get a message saying, 'Your most recent blood pressure reading is concerningly high. Please take another reading,' in Haitian Creole or in Spanish. And just that mindset of the onus is on us to help our providers think creatively, how do we meet this patient where they are?
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's remarkable. And as I think about the technology tools available, all of that—the ability to do a text message in a patient's native language—is, of course, possible with the available technology, but it takes recognizing how to deliver that. I know we're coming up on time, so we only have a few minutes left. I wanted to close with maybe two broad questions that you reflect on. One about the future of connected care, particularly in remote patient monitoring. And the second, more about your career advice. Let's start a little bit with your thoughts on, if you look five years from now or 10 years from now with how rapidly technology is evolving, what do you see for the future of the presence of remote patient monitoring and other use of technology for chronic conditions in health care?
The Future of Connected Care: From Wearables to Ambient Monitoring
Dr. Lucienne Ide: There are a bunch of technologies on the floor here at HLTH that it's been fun to walk around and look at. And I think one thing we will see is today's connected care technology is taking unconnected technology and making it connected. Taking a traditional blood pressure cuff and putting a SIM card in it and using it in an RPM program. And that was the stepwise innovation.
I think we will start to see more ambient measurement of physiological readings. There are a ton of companies working on camera-based technologies to measure blood pressure through facial scans. Nobody has FDA approval for that yet, but they will get there. And imagine that the mirror in your bathroom every morning when you go to brush your teeth measures your blood pressure, your heart rate, your respiratory rate, your pulse ox passively.
That's the stuff that gets me excited because what we're doing today is incremental. It is not totally disrupting all of our concepts of how do you take a blood pressure reading. That will be mind blowing, but we have to get there. I think this foundation that we've established of patient engagement models and reimbursement models is important and now we can build on it.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Fantastic. Last question. What's interesting about your background is that you represent several phenotypes. You have the investor background, technology background, and then clinician background. And then here you are as CEO of an impactful health technology company. What advice do you have for someone who's interested in the field of health technology, wants to make an impact from any of those backgrounds or from all of them? What have you learned along the way that you would recommend to others who are just thinking about what they can do with their career?
Career Advice for Aspiring HealthTech Innovators
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Don't be afraid of what you don't know. And to make mistakes—I've made plenty of mistakes. I've done plenty of learning on the fly, figuring it out. Early days, someone said to me, 'Well, you can't start a company if you don't have an MBA. You should go to business school.' And I'm like, 'I think my husband will leave me if I tell him I'm getting another graduate degree.' I'll figure it out how to build a P&L model.
And then, ask for help and be passionate about your vision and what you believe in. I think that earns you a lot of grace and people want to help you if they see that passion of a vision of, 'Here's a problem I want to solve. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to get there.' And there's a whole community here that wants to help other folks make health care better.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Thank you so much, Dr. Lucienne Ide. It's been great having you on the show.
Dr. Lucienne Ide: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Thanks to our listeners for tuning in for another episode of HealthTech Remedy, part of our special series live from HLTH 2025. Thanks for joining us and for learning more about health technology applied to effective and equitable remote care. For our listeners, you can learn more about Rimidi’s remote monitoring platform and chronic care programs at rimidi.com and follow insights, of course, from the HLTH 2025 conference on LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in to HealthTech Remedy. We'll see you again soon.
Credits
HealthTech Remedy is produced by Podcast Studio X.
