Question: What is the Market for Telehealth?

As a telehealth association, this is a question the ATSP gets asked quite frequently. The answer, of course, is never simple. In many ways, the term "market for telehealth" is a vague phrase whose very definition can be changed depending on what sort of numbers the researcher is looking for.

Take the most basic telehealth example of a nurse consulting a patient over the phone: Does the market include the hardware (the two telephones), the transmission fees (the phone call charges), the infrastructure (the phone lines), the health care knowledge and labor (the Nurse), the specialized training (the nurse's telephone triage training), all or just some of these things? Depending on what you want to count in this example, the market number can range greatly.

Still, that's not to say there hasn't been some good research efforts into finding the size of the market. If you are looking for this number, you might start with the TIE's Telehealth and Telemedicine Market Links, which feature direct links to multitude of reports about the size of the telehealth industry.

As always, if you know of more recent reports or research into this question, please let us know and we'll add them to the TIE.