Also cited in Scientia's research was a study sponsored by Philips, a key player in the industry that has bought up four telehealth companies in the last few years. The study compared patients using networked monitoring devices with those only getting phone support from nurses, and found the telehealth group spent 26 percent less time in the hospital, with a result of 10 percent cost savings.

And more striking than the economic advantages were the human ones: survival rates in the remote patient monitoring group were 27 percent higher.


Obstacles to adoption

Despite predicting growth, Scientia acknowledges that significant obstacles have to be overcome to make widespread adoption of telehealth possible.

One hurdle is finding ways to incentivize doctors, most of whom work under fee-for-service programs and who make money by seeing patients in the office, not for using Internet-based monitoring systems. But all this could change once the much-lauded patient-centered medical homes get off the ground.

"Remote health monitoring actually fits really well in [this]," Glorikian says. "Medical home pilots are now being run that reorganize physician incentives around outcomes."

Under these programs, doctors will be paid for how healthy their patients are, and will be required to talk with them on the phone, correspond over email and look at diagnostic data collected remotely. Scientia knows of some confidential pilot projects run by self-insured groups looking at managing diabetes populations using RHM, and so far the changes are promising.

"Doctors will reorganize themselves to try to take advantage of it," Glorikian says.

But the market would still have to deal with the larger issue of reimbursement. Currently, Medicare and most health plans don't directly reimburse telehealth services. Instead, home health agencies hired by plans for disease management care will use them if they think they will help them improve service and save money.

But Glorikian predicts that bigger clinical studies will eventually convince more payers, and even the CMS, about the benefits of RHM.

"Most of the studies that show effectiveness have been run with smaller populations," Glorikian observes. "And this is because remote health manufacturers run these trials to convince clients to use these products... But if we run bigger trials, I think some of these companies feel they'll win better reimbursements, and help shift some of these barriers out of the way," Glorikian adds. "Then the market could be a lot bigger than what we're projecting today."

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