The remote patient monitoring (RPM) market has been attracting the attention of venture capitalists recently. Over a week in July, several companies secured millions of dollars of private equity investing, while others signed partnership deals to develop new products.
The RPM industry is expected to increase sharply over the coming years as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) in the US has begun reimbursement of several RPM activities. Previous lack of reimbursement was one of the chief obstacles to the profitability of RPM, prompting healthcare suppliers to sit up and take note.
Remote monitoring activity heats up
In the past year alone, there were over $1 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions and market activity was equally fierce overall sub-segments, with the recent activity focused on the heart failure and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) areas.
Two companies, POPS! Diabetes Care and Rethink Medical, have raised capital from venture funding to the tune of several million dollars each. Another company, Senseonics, had debt and equity offerings. Senseonics and POPS! both provide CGM solutions, whereas Rethink Medical is focusing on a real-time heart failure alert system.
Meanwhile, WeHealth (by Servier and Lucine) entered into a joint development and distribution partnership for a new product. WeHealth specialises in data collection and the display of patient information for doctors to improve physician workflow. This is another part of RPM that focuses on data management and product integration.
If this a representative sample of the activity in the RPM space, then this is definitely a field to keep tabs on.
