More Companies Offering Telehealth Monitors as Way To Improve Access, Decrease Costs
The Boston Globe on Wednesday examined how an increased number of medical device companies -- such as Honeywell International, Philips Electronics and Viterion TeleHealthcare -- have begun to compete in the market for "telehealth" monitors, which allow physicians and nurses to track the health of patients from remote locations. According to the Globe, use of telehealth monitors "can keep patients comfortably at home" and allow physicians and nurses to focus on the most serious cases, as well as "save the expense and disruption of hospital visits by catching signs of trouble before a patient needs an ambulance." The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent $20 million to install about 15,000 telehealth monitors in homes of veterans and plans to have 50,000 installed by 2009. In addition, some home health care companies have begun to offer or plan to offer telehealth monitors to patients. Marcia Reissig -- a nurse and CEO of Massachusetts-based Partners Home Care, which offers telehealth monitors to patients -- said that the devices cost about $200 monthly to purchase and operate, compared with about $78 for a single nurse visit. She added that telehealth monitors can decrease health care costs through a reduction in hospitalizations. According to VA, telehealth monitors can reduce health care costs by one-third.
Issues
However, "hobbled by confusing technology and a Byzantine health insurance system that pays for nurses to check on patients in person but not from a distance, the idea has been slow to take off," and only a small percentage of the tens of millions of U.S. residents with chronic conditions have the devices, the Globe reports. According to the Globe, patients who require home health care are "unlikely to be able to navigate a variety of systems and interfaces" available in the market for telehealth monitors, and most medical device companies "sell proprietary devices that don't communicate with competitors' equipment." In addition, Medicare and most private health insurers do not cover telehealth monitors because they are not considered therapeutic devices and because no large study has proven their cost-effectiveness. Joseph Kvedar, director of telemedicine for the Partners HealthCare System, said, "Just because you have a nifty way of doing something doesn't mean that you can create a market" (Heuser, Boston Globe, 7/26).
