Telemedicine Technologies’ Fastest Growing Segment By Type Of Service Area Will Be Tele-Home

Telemedicine is the use of information technologies and electronic communication to provide healthcare services when patients and healthcare professionals are at different locations. Based on type of service area, the telemedicine technologies market is segmented into tele-home and tele-hospital. Among these, the tele-hospital market segment held the largest share, accounting for $23.5 billion in 2018. Tele-hospital involves the delivery of remote healthcare services to inpatients or healthcare service offerings within the hospital.

Despite its smaller market share, the tele-home market will be the fastest growing segment of the two, at an annual growth rate of 21.3% to 2022. This can be attributed to the increasing awareness of the tele-home segment among patients, and also the reduction of hospital costs through minimizing the stay of patients at hospitals.

Tele-home involves the delivery of healthcare services directly to patients at home by means of telecommunications technologies that enable interactive voice and video communication, and health-related data transmission. The use of tele-home helps better management of chronic disease patients with diseases such as diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, heart diseases, etc., and it also helps patients to reduce their hospital treatment costs by reducing the length of stay in hospital.

Tele-home technology is designed to meet the growing needs of the aging population who require very unsophisticated and minimal monitoring. The main types of tele-home healthcare services are remote patient monitoring, consultation, diagnosis, treatment, and remote presence.

The global telemedicine technologies market can also be segmented based on the type of application areas into tele-radiology, tele-consulting, tele-monitoring, tele-surgery and others (tele-technologies for health education, administration, research, etc.) Of these, the tele-radiology market was the largest segment of the telemedicine technologies market, valued at $22.2 billion in 2018. Tele-radiology is medical technology that is used to store digital radiology images electronically and transmit them from one location to another location for diagnosis, consultation or treatment. Tele-radiology is an emerging technology in the healthcare environment where it enables hospitals to access radiologists for diagnostics.

Valued at $9.2 billion, the tele-consultation market was the second largest segment of the telemedicine technologies market. Tele-consultation will also be the fastest growing segment, growing at an annual rate of more than 24% to 2022. Tele-consultation provides virtual communication between healthcare professionals or specialists at two different locations to get second opinions about difficult cases; or between a patient and a healthcare professional to consult about diagnosis and treatment. It uses tools such as web conferencing or audio/video conferencing.