Telehealth To Grow Six-Fold By 2017

Remote patient monitoring will ramp up worldwide, largely driven by U.S hospitals working to reduce readmissions and avoid Medicare penalties, says InMedica study.

Surf's up for telehealth, according to a new report from InMedica, a subsidiary of IMS Research. Defining telehealth narrowly as remote patient monitoring (RPM), InMedica predicts that it will be applied to 1.8 million patients worldwide by 2017, compared to 308,000 today.

The biggest driver of market growth is the worldwide efforts of governments to curb the growth of healthcare costs. "Readmission penalties introduced by the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are driving providers to adopt telehealth as a means of reducing readmission penalties," the report noted. "Faced with increasing healthcare expenditure, other governments, including the U.K., France and China, are also promoting telehealth as a long-term cost-saving measure."

Partly because of the effort to reduce readmissions, and also because of a strong evidence base, congestive heart failure is the condition for which telemonitoring is most often prescribed. However, the report pointed out that patients with respiratory conditions including COPD, diabetes, hypertension, and mental illnesses are also being monitored remotely...