Healthcare and Telehealth Systems

Given the opportunity presented by such solutions to improve outcomes, Healthcare system now sees the need to expand its customer offer to include telehealth and to deploy the remote technologies that underpin it.  Therefore needs to select a suitable vendor.

This project will analyze three telehealth vendors (Ideal Life, Robert Bosch and Tunstall) to determine which solution best meets our needs in terms of vendor partnership and product offering.

Although TeleHealth monitoring is not a new concept or new technology, demand is emerging with significant potential in specific international markets, such as Europe, India, China and several Middle Eastern countries.   Healthcare system therefore intends to run a twelve month telehealth pilot to confirm how this solution can add value to our own services in both Australia and Germany.  As such, it will involve all functional areas of the Healthcare system organization.

Telehealth is defined as healthcare services, consultation and expertise delivered via telecommunications medium, over any distance. Telehealth uses equipment to monitor people’s health within their own home. So, for example, equipment can be used to coach patients to improve their self management, monitor vital signs such as blood pressure, blood oxygen levels or weight. The responses and measures are then automatically transmitted to a clinician who can observe health status without the patient leaving home. The clinician monitors daily readings to look for trends that could indicate deterioration in condition.  Feedback or readings that are out of the range expected are flagged to the clinician using a traffic light system.  Telehealth solutions offer a way of delivering tailored care for patients with long term chronic conditions, which helps improve quality of life and prevent avoidable hospital admissions. 

The advantages of the inclusion of telehealth build upon some of the arguments that are made for Disease Management. Telehealth offers improved access to earlier reported (‘real time’) and more accurate medical data from the patients, increase touch points with users, improved patient health outcomes and decision making, reduced hospitalizations and healthcare costs, redundant diagnostic procedures or tests and reduced patient travel and waiting time.

Telehealth services and markets have been available for more than two decades now but have not seen significant growth in penetration rates as the technical solutions offered were not regarded as entirely credible until more recently.   Following the success of telecare, (Telecare uses a combination of alarms, sensors and other equipment to help people live independently) telehealth is now considered as a major opportunity for the management of patients with chronic diseases and telehealth providers can now demonstrate strong evidence in satisfaction, clinical improvement and ROI.  As such, the global telehealth market is estimated to grow to more than $8bn by 2012.   

        

         Shown below is the general development of telehealth over the last century.

                         

Although potential teleheath markets around the globe have been slower in penetration and growth than has been experienced in the USA, there are now a range of pilots underway in various countries and the growth rate of the European markets gained significant momentum after 2000.  


For example, in the UK telehealth services are relatively extensive (though often small scale) and a major tender exercise to secure telehealth monitoring for 5000 patients is currently ongoing in Northern Ireland.  The UK Department of Health is also running an evaluation as part of its Whole Systems Demonstrator (WSD) pilots which are analysing 3 controlled trials.  There has been less progress in Germany, France, Spain and Italy although all European countries have adopted telecare enthusiastically and are beginning to experiment with telehealth.  One of Healthcare system’ short listed vendors, Tunstall Limited (based in the UK) has been at the forefront of this charge.  


The market potential has seen the German company, Robert Bosch (the 8^th most recognized Brand in Europe) also enter this space with acquisitions of US players.  In Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, various trials are also being developed and there is significant potential for telehealth in markets like India and China.