Mordor: Telemedicine Global Market to Reach $34B by End of 2020

The telemedicine space is poised to reach a global valuation of more than $34 billion by the end of 2020, according to a new report from Mordor Intelligence. The firm indicates that therapeutic vaccines will be among the key drivers of its growth, and that North America should account for at least 40 percent of the above-noted dollar figure.

Mordor Intelligence’s “Global Telemedicine Market – Growth, Trends & Forecasts (2015-2020)” says while telehealth is a broader term that can entail use of electronic data and communications technologies to support long-distance health care, health-related education for patients and/or professionals, and public health-related efforts, telemedicine is a subset of that referring specifically to remote clinical services.

The increase in the age of the population and incidence of chronic diseases, paired with the expanding software market, are expected to move the telemedicine market further forward, in Mordor Intelligence’s assessment. The appeal of telemedicine is also clear in light of increasing health care costs, the firm notes.

Potentially gating factors to the growth of telemedicine, meanwhile, include high technology costs, lack of physician support, legal and reimbursement concerns, and poor implementations, according to Mordor Intelligence.

The firm goes on to identify what it sees a key telemedicine players, which includes 3M (News - Alert) Health, Aerotel Medical Systems, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc., IBM, Intouch Technologies, Medical International Research, Medtronic, Roche, and Siemens (News - Alert) Healthcare, among others.

Yorktel is another company that has made telehealth and telemedicine a priority. As reported last fall by TMCnet, the company last year hired Peter McLain as vice president of telehealth, and James Custer as its program manager for telehealth.

“Our services include professional consulting, through assessment, design and implementation,” Yorktel CEO Ron Gaboury told TMC’s (News - Alert) INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine last year. “This complements our post implementation offerings: Managed Services (maintenance, troubleshooting, scheduling/launching, and on site staffing) and VideoCloud VaaS (public, private and hybrid options; self-service or managed). As video communications moves beyond corporate settings, we recently expanded into verticalized applications, including our VideoKiosk, mobile TeleHealth carts, and iRobot’s Ava500.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle