Monday, 28 January 2013 - In 2012 there was estimated to be 308,000 patients remotely monitored by their healthcare provider for congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, hypertension and mental health conditions worldwide. The majority of these were post-acute patients who have been hospitalised and discharged. As healthcare providers seek to reduce readmission rates and track disease progression, telehealth is projected to reach 1.8 million patients worldwide by 2017, according to The World Market for Telehealth – An Analysis of Demand Dynamics – 2012, a new report from InMedica, part of IHS (NYSE: IHS).
In addition to post-acute patients, telehealth is also used to monitor ambulatory patients – those who have been diagnosed with a disease at an ambulatory care facility but have not been hospitalised. However, telehealth has a much larger penetration in post-acute care as compared to ambulatory care patients as the majority of patients are only considered for home monitoring following hospital discharge to prevent readmission. In the U.S., for example, 140,000 post-acute patients were estimated to have been monitored by telehealth in 2012, as compared to 80,000 ambulatory patients.
“A major challenge for telehealth, is for it to reach the wider population of ambulatory care patients. However, the clinical and economic outcomes for telehealth are more established for post-acute care patients. Indeed, even for post-acute care patients, telehealth is usually prescribed only in the most severe cases, and where patients have been hospitalised more than once in a year,” commented Theo Ahadome, senior analyst at InMedica.
CHF currently accounts for the majority of telehealth patients; in addition to being one of the largest cost-burdens for hospitalisation, the clinical outcomes of telehealth for CHF patients are most established. The number of telehealth patients with COPD is also projected to grow strongly as telehealth focus continues to expand to respiratory diseases. The successful results of the Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) program in the U.K. are serving as strong evidence-base for the benefits of telehealth for COPD patients. However, by 2017, Diabetes is forecast to account for the second largest share of telehealth patients, overtaking COPD. Home monitoring of glucose levels for diabetes patients is more established through personal glucose monitors. There is an increasing drive to integrate these monitors with telehealth systems, allowing care givers access to patient glucose data.
Over the next five years, InMedica identifies four main drivers of telehealth demand:
- Federal-driven demand: Readmission penalties introduced by the U.S. Centre for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are driving providers to adopt telehealth as a means of reducing readmission penalties. 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.
- Provider-driven demand: Healthcare providers want to use telehealth to increase ties to patients and improve quality of care. In many cases this is being done irrespective of the lack of a clear financial return on investment.
- Payer-driven demand: Telehealth is also being increasingly used by insurance providers to increase their competitiveness and reduce in-patient pay-outs, by working directly with telehealth suppliers to monitor their patient base.
- Patient-driven demand: There is currently very little demand from patients actively seeking out and requesting telehealth services from their payer or provider. Patient-driven demand is mostly limited to rural/non-metropolitan areas where there is a poor availability of clinics and physicians. As fitness awareness increases and consumers adopt personal devices to track their fitness, they will also increasingly seek professional devices to remotely track disease state.
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About InMedica
InMedica is the medical technology research division of IMS Research, the leading provider of market research and consultancy to the global electronics industry. InMedica publish high quality, in-depth market research on key medical markets including Medical Imaging (such as ultrasound and x-ray equipment), Clinical Care Devices (such as patient monitors and infusion pumps), Consumer Medical Devices (such as blood-pressure monitors and heart-rate monitors), Healthcare IT (such as PACS and EMR) and Telehealth. We offer our clients global coverage of the medical electronics industry, as well as dedicated reports on high growth regions, such as China, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
About IMS Research
IMS Research, recently acquired by IHS (NYSE: IHS), is a leading supplier of market research and consultancy to over 2500 clients worldwide, including most of the world’s largest technology companies. Established in the UK in 1989, IMS Research now has dedicated analyst teams focused on the factory automation, automotive, communications, computer, consumer, display, financial & ID, LED & lighting, medical, power & energy, solar PV, smart grid and security markets. Currently publishing over 350 different syndicated report titles each year, these in-depth publications are used by major electronics and industrial companies to assess market trends, solve marketing problems, and improve the efficiency of their businesses.
1.8 million patients – worldwide – by 2017 !? Only? This is far too low. I thought that telehealth (télémédecine in French) was already reaching much more persons. Maybe the name of this technology is partly responsible of this failure: in English “telehealth” sounds a bit too general, like an ordinary TV program. In French, “télémédecine” sounds much more serious, more trustworthy: people know that there’s actually a MD behind the screen Just a thought :-)
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