This is the device industry's wireless wake-up call. With all the speed and acceleration of an advancing information technology industry, forces outside of the medical device industry are driving shifts in medical product markets and business models. Those forces include the consumerization. globalization, systematization, and economies of scale created by IT. Wireless medicine enables connectivity between caregivers and patients, continuous monitoring of patients with chronic diseases, and a new paradigm for personalized medicine, one based on the patterns that can be gleaned from enormous volumes of individualized patient data, rather than on blood-based biomarkers.

A new report finds the US health care system could reduce costs by nearly $200 billion during the next 25 years if remote monitoring tools were utilized much more widely. These conclusions come from Robert Litan, PhD, an economist who analyzed data from a remote monitoring program at the Veterans Administration, as well as other smaller programs, and extrapolated the findings to show how much money health care could save annually if the proper remote monitoring tools were used. We interview Litan in this issue.

Manufacturers of patient monitoring equipment are responding to a challenging hospital environment. They're providing advanced portable and telemetry monitoring systems that enable the continuous monitoring of critically ill patients, regardless of their location within the hospital, and often at a lower cost than could be achieved using traditional bedside systems. Portable and telemetry systems are two of the highest growth segments in the US patient monitoring market, according to Windhover Information/Medtech Insight's recently published report, US Markets for Patient Monitoring Products, which forecasts compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of 8.5% and 13.0%, respectively, in these segments through 2012.