Where Does Telehealth’s Greatest Opportunity Lie?Where Does Telehealth’s Greatest Opportunity Lie?
A new report finds that the home health market is where the telehealth industry will find it greatest opportunity and leave its greatest mark.
May 19, 2014

Telemedicine is no longer an outlier in the healthcare industry. Indeed many believe it is the linchpin on which success of the new healthcare landscape rests.
As millions of uninsured win coverage for the first time, with no commensurate rise in the number of primary care providers.
Last week, Frost & Sullivan released the Pulse of Telehealth survey report in partnership with the American Telemedicine Association and found, not surprisingly that, home health is where the lion’s share of the opportunity lies.
The opportunity in home health is what is driving the interest of traditional medical device companies into startups in the remote patient monitoring space. However, the report also found that non-U.S. startups are not particularly sophisticated in terms of marketing and sales strategy and do not have much tenhnological differentiation. They are merely hoping to catch the remote patient monitoring wave and do not understand the market including the level of competition from experienced players in the space - Bosch Healthcare, Honeywell HomMed and Ideal Life.
The report also polled respondents about the impact that telehalth will have on different healthcare markets over the next five years.
In recent years, gamification and wellness programs have been touted as an effective strategy in bringing about healthy behavior change. In this report, however, 42% of respondents replied that they will have moderate impact whereas another 16% said it would have limited to no impact at all.
The low scores of wellness programs were one of the surprising revelations of the report, said Connected Health Global Research Director Daniel Ruppar with Frost & Sullivan.
"Both must be done as part of broader engagement strategies, and the market, healthcare professionals and consumers are still on the earlier side of better integration into healthcare practice and experience still," Ruppar said in an email.
[Photo Credit: istockphoto.com user alexsl]
-- By Arundhati Parmar, Senior Editor, MD+DI
[email protected]
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