Homecare telehealth, also known as remote patient monitoring, is a rapidly growing field. A new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor, "Telehealth's Increasing Role in Healthcare" predicts that the homecare telehealth market will grow at a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 56% compared to 9.9% in the clinical market. Telehealth is the use of a digital network to provide automated monitoring and treatment delivery to a patient who is in a different physical location than the care provider. It can refer to simple communications, such as e-mails sent between patients and providers, or to extremely complex procedures, such as remote robotic surgery. Common forms of telehealth include video conferencing and home monitoring devices. For example, patients who have diabetes would be able to transmit blood sugar level readings to providers for review via a telephone line.

Telehealth increases access to healthcare by allowing providers to see more patients in less time without geographic constraints, and it reduces overall healthcare costs through daily monitoring that prevents emergency care and expensive re-hospitalizations. Although significant barriers affect the adoption of telehealth practices, the field's growth is driven by sheer numbers of elderly and chronically ill patients. Currently confined to a relatively small number of patients with a few particular conditions, in the long term, telehealth devices will be directly available to general consumers, which will increase usage. Some projects have tested the concept of "telehospice" using remote devices for communications between care providers and hospice patients. According to the Datamonitor report, telehealth must move into the forefront of healthcare agendas and become an integral part of the daily practice of medicine to achieve maximum adoption rates. Successful telehealth solutions will be incorporated into clinical workflows and linked to other healthcare technologies, such as electronic health records. Accuracy, mobility, and ease of use are a few of the criteria that end users will use to judge which solutions they will purchase.