healthcare

Having watched the home health technology market crawl along at a snail’s pace for most of the last decade, I’m excited to expand my focus to aging in place.  I see a fundamental — and absolutely critical — difference between the narrow focus of healthcare unbound/remote health monitoring market and the more expansive purview of aging in place.  That difference can be summed up as the difference between fear and hope.

This has been going on for some time -- the slow or no growth in the home security industry -- and the potential for expanding into a new line of business offering Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS), aka 'medical alarms'. This security industry article outlines the great opportunity for home security providers and their 'rapid response' (RMR) call center vendors.

Reimbursement pain is so last-year. The 2008 Connected Health Symposium was, I thought, a somewhat gloomy affair -- gnashing of teeth and hand wringing over government and insurer footdragging, limited market penetration, and still no reimbursement for remote monitoring and other telehealth technologies. This year, despite a worsening economy, the mood was much perkier.

At least with directory sites -- you basically know where you stand -- somewhere in them is a business model for listing long-term care housing and service directory entries, referring and being compensated for leads about those entries, and advertising. Not so with caregiving portals. Here, if there is a business motive, it's about advertising and a cut of the commerce, if any, on the site.