The number of remotely monitored patients grew by 51 percent to 4.9 million in 2015 as the market entered a growth phase fuelled by rising market acceptance in several key verticals, according to a report by Berg Insight. This number includes all patients enrolled in m-health care programmes in which connected medical devices are used as a part of the care regimen. Connected medical devices used for various forms of personal health tracking are not included in this figure. Researchers estimate that the number of remotely monitored patients will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.9 percent to reach 36.1 million by 2020.
The two main applications are monitoring of patients with implantable cardiac rhythm management (CRM) devices and monitoring of patients with sleep therapy devices. These two verticals accounted for 81 percent of all connected home medical monitoring systems in 2015. Telehealth is the third largest segment with 0.41 million connections at the end of the year. All other device categories, including ECG, glucose level, medication adherence and others, stood for less than 0.2 million connections each at the end of the year. The sleep therapy segment accounted for the majority of the market growth in 2015. ResMed surpassed Medtronic as the world’s largest provider of connected healthcare solutions for remote patient monitoring in 2015. Earlier in 2015, Medtronic became the first company in the world to surpass the milestone of 1.0 million remotely monitored patients.
Another landmark event in 2015 was that mobile connectivity surpassed PSTN and LAN as the most widely used connectivity technology for remote patient monitoring. An emerging alternative is that patients use their own mobile devices as health hubs. The bring your own device (BYOD) model can in theory be very cost-efficient as no dedicated hardware or subscriptions are needed, but accounted for less than two percent of all connections in 2015, researchers said.
Source: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/remotely-monitored-patients-up-51-to-49-mln-in-2015--1117412