Appropriate equipment is a huge barrier. Remote monitoring units typically cost between $3,000 and $5,000 and most organizations interviews felt that the price needed to drop to below $1,000 to spur adoption.
People living in remote areas tend to have noisy phone lines or use dial tones that can't allow collected information to be sent over telephone wires, and many elderly patients do not have broadband connections.
With SimplyHome, both these problems are eradicated. The equipment cost is < $1K already. And there is neither a phone line or broadband requirement. The service sends its data on a two-way basis in real time using the Cingular wireless network.The article says that 65% of health care organizations interviewed were investing in remote monitoring equipment for high-risk, high-cost patients with multiple chronic diseases (called "frequent fliers" due to the many doctor visits per year they require). All indications are that this percentage is going up by the month, and increasingly organizations and families alike are contemplating digital monitoring for residents with lesser risks and health challenges, such that they can live at home longer.
And here's a compelling statistic regarding telehealth relating to just one chronic illness: A professor at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine has published estimates saying that remote monitoring could bring national costs of caring for congestive heart failure patients down from $8 billion a year to $4.2 billion, including costs of providing remote monitoring.
