The healthcare industry is banking on telehealth to reduce healthcare costs and provide significant savings on health services worldwide. So much so, in fact, that the market is expected to grow more than 130 percent over the next four years--to a whopping $27.3 billion. That's an annual growth just shy of 20 percent per year.
The report from Wellesley, Mass.-based BCC Research breaks the telehealth industry down in an interesting way--comparing "telehospital/clinic" providers (hospitals that sponsor and run telehealth sessions from their facilities) "telehome" providers (which use telehealth to monitor and track patients in their homes).
According to the report, the telehome segment is growing the fastest, at an annual rate of 22.5 percent per year. At $3.5 billion in 2011, it should rise to $9.7 billion by 2016, the report states. The telehospital/clinical market is coming along a little more slowly at about 17 percent growth per year--that's a jump from $8.1 billion in 2011 to $17.6 billion by 2016.
Those numbers are a bit higher than other researchers' estimates in the past year, however.
InMedica, which published The World Market for Telehealth, last fall, only predicts the market to grow to $1 billion by 2015 and possibly $6 billion by 2020, according to a story in MedTechBusiness.com.
Kalorama Information's most recent data, published in February 2011, combines remote patient monitoring with telehealth, and puts that combined market at about $18 billion by 2014.
To learn more:
- read the BCC Research summary
- check out the InMedica data in MedTechBusiness.com