Public and Private Healthcare providers have reason to smile, as Juniper Research has painted a rosy picture for the US and Canadian healthcare markets.
According to its Mobile Health Opportunities Report, remote patient monitoring using cellular networks is going to be the savior of the healthcare market. By resorting to remote monitoring, healthcare providers are expected to save between $1.96billion and $5.83billion in healthcare costs by the year 2014.
Due to the inherent structure of their health systems, more advanced remote monitoring rollouts, and high healthcare costs, the US and Canadian markets is expected to generate the most cost savings.
"The cost of a hospital bed, used as a proxy for cost, is much higher in the North American region, partly due to the role of health insurance in the US healthcare sector," Anthony Cox, Senior Analyst at Juniper Research and author of the report, said, and added that factor would have direct impact on how much cost remote monitoring can save.
In any scenario, developed countries were bound to save healthcare systems huge sums of money because of mobile monitoring. However, the report says the cost of mobile monitoring means that its deployment is questionable in developing regions.
Further findings from the mobile healthcare report indicated that those selling mHealth services will need to establish the correct route to market, as this would be the key to their success. There were also indications of renewed interest in mHealth from operators globally in the past 18 months.
The report predicts a thriving market for health and fitness mobile apps, which would in turn trigger a new market for advanced apps, which integrated sensors worn on the body. The report includes analysis of the current state of play in the mHealth market and contains six year forecasts for key areas within the mobile health sector and associated service revenues.
Forecasts about the number of mobile monitoring events, revenues from mobile health monitoring, scenarios detailing cost savings attributable to mobile health monitoring, number of health and fitness application downloads, health and fitness download revenues, also found a place.
The Mobile Healthcare whitepaper and further details of the study 'Mobile Healthcare Opportunities, Monitoring Applications & mHealth Strategies 2010-2014' can be freely downloaded .
Juniper Research provides research and analytical services to the global hi-tech communications sector, providing consultancy, analyst reports and industry commentary.
Mini Swamy is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page .Edited by
Patrick Barnard
