Epsicom Study Puts Telemonitoring Market at Over $1 Billion within Next Four Years

Telemonitoring. You may have heard of it but what is it? It’s the ability to stay at home even with a chronic disease like diabetes, yet be in constant contact with your doctor so you don’t need to be hospitalized for treatment, as you would have been before.

Telemonitoring devices run the gamut from blood glucose monitors to heart rate monitors to fitness and wellness apps. They’re also called mHealth apps. Interest in telemonitoring is on the rise due to its potential to improve the health of patients with chronic diseases, “enable people to receive care in the comfort of their own home and reduce the number of patients that have to been seen in doctors' offices or hospitalized,” according to a recent article.

This technology is so important now because the rising rates of chronic disease are pushing healthcare providers into seeking better and more-cost-effective ways of delivering care, the press release says.

A new report  by Epsicom has found that the global telemonitoring market may be just at the beginning of what could be a meteoric rise in growth, “driven by the world's aging population and increasingly unhealthy lifestyles, which are leading more and more people to need care for chronic diseases,” according to the company’s press release.

More than 10 million adults and children in the U.S., or over a quarter of the population, have diabetes, just one chronic disease out there, according to the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse, which keeps statistics on the illness. It’s easy to see the value of telemonitoring here.

But Epsicom’s report, Telemonitoring: Challenges & Opportunities, also notes that, though telemonitoring technology has great promise, it has yet to be widely implemented. On top of that, many “operational obstacles” remain before it can be used everywhere, at any time, including the fact that the technology has not been shown conclusively to improve care or reduce costs and it doesn't yet have broad reimbursement coverage.

“More importantly, it requires healthcare providers to change working practices and realign healthcare budgets, while patients have to want to be actively involved in their healthcare for it to work,” Epsicom says in its report.

The study points out that the World Health Organization estimates that “chronic diseases now account for twice as many deaths as communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, and predicts that deaths due to chronic disease will increase by 17% over the next 10 years,” and this makes the need to effectively manage these conditions more important than ever.  The report states that other factors are also making telemonitoring attractive. “The global economic downturn and reduced healthcare budgets are also leading healthcare managers to look to telemonitoring as a way of ‘doing more for less.’”