The real problem in the
U.S. healthcare system that you
have now is the length of hospital stays.
You've got patients with chronic
conditions, and they
need to be supervised by
some type of medical professional but
staying in the hospital is a very costly option.
So you've got to get patients out
of the hospital, how do you
do it without keeping them monitored by a healthcare professional.
Enter remote patient monitoring.
These devices, which could be installed in a patient's house,
it might be as simple as
a small device that
measures a patient's glucose and
notifies a nurse if there's any spikes,
they are going to enable some
chronically ill patients to leave
the hospital, get home, and be with their families.
And so it's an incredibly interesting
market and for that reason
we've seen tremendous revenue growth.
Between 2011 and 2012 our
report found 17% revenue growth,
which is fairly high for the medical device industry.
One thing that's interesting to note
is that not only is there intense
revenue growth that we've seen
and demand for these devices, but
hospitals plan to purchase more.
We know that from surveys of
hospital IT directors, CIO's.
They're making budgets that are
planning for purchases of
remote patient monitoring equipment.
Kalorama believes that
this will continue to be
an attractive market and that we'll
see growth rates like we've
seen in the past
year, the past five years really.
It's rare for medical device
markets to see such intense
revenue growth and it's rare
for that growth to be consistent;
but in this case, we expect that will continue.
Why?
You might say that remote
patient monitoring is a
device product area that's
maybe not too big to fail,
but too good to fail,
it's too good of a concept,
everybody's behind it.
Healthcare payers want it,
hospitals want it, patients
want it, doctors want it.
Everybody is incentivized to
make sure these systems succeed.
Why?
You want to get that patient
out of the hospital and at home.
We've covered this for five
years as Kalorama Information, publishing
a full study of the market for these devices.
And we found it necessary now
to make a separation between
two types. So there is
remote patient monitoring in the
hospital, where it's
nurse on one floor monitors
a patient that might be on
another floor, and might monitor several patients in the hospital;
and then there's what we call
telemedicine, where a
patient is at home and they're
being monitored by a physician
or a nurse or a technician, far away.
We've made that segmentation because
they really are two different businesses.
And one of the
great things about market research
when it's done well, is that
you delineate for the customer what
the breakouts of
the market are, so that they
can attack that part of
the market that they want to get into in their business.