Okay, okay, we get it – everyone wants to age at home.  How do we know?  AARP say so. Forget that AARP’s survey sample might be skewed towards the younger end of fifty- and sixty-somethings, not 80-90 year olds. Forget that life expectancy is lengthening -- the good life or the not-so-good – apparently indistinguishable among the life expectancy extender-types, aka the healthcare system.  Forget that this is a gloomy and isolating picture for those with limited transportation in their 80’s and 90’s, those living alone with mild to moderate dementia, and those for whom it is a great chore just to get up and about. 

 The xHealths prefer to ignore the elephant in the room.  Every day I am treated to a plethora of updates (remember my 24 LinkedIn Groups) about this conference and that event for Health 451.0, Connected YouKnowWhat, Wireless WhatsUp, and Mobile Name-that-disease. The very word ‘health’ connotes opportunity (avoid 30-day hospital readmissions!), visions of reimbursement, and smiling clinicians on the far side of webcams.  After all, shouldn’t the xHealths target employer-funded health insurance programs, monitoring ailments among employees and their kids’ childhood diseases? And doesn’t the ‘m’ in mHealth mean mobile, mean smart phone, always-on, on-the-go and on-the-run?  Tweet your stats to your friends and get a friendly e-mail from your doctor’s iPad.

Analyst firms have re-discovered telehealth – and it’s big, big, big.  So trumpets Information Week’s coverage of a new study from market researcher InMedica. They size the global market at $6.28 billion by 2020, up from its current cited size of shipments at $163 million in 2010.  This must mean that we have a tipping point of uptake within vendor marketer lines of sight. And no wonder, so many other markets driven by seized-up consumer spending are tepid or shrinking. If you believe this forecast, certainly it’s about time for a market that has languished for years, not to say decades, despite the Veteran Administration validation and rollout, and numerous reports that verified effectiveness at keeping patients out of the hospital. Hmm, though, maybe the tipping point is sooner.  BCC Research, another analyst group already valued the ‘telehome’ subset of telemedicine at $2.9 billion in 2010, rising to $7.9 billion by 2015.