Most surveys indicate that eight out of ten home health care agencies have not invested in home telehealth systems. Asked why, most say the price of entry is too large a capital expense. For them, there is good news. Several new companies have appeared, indicating a possible trend, that can help an agency implement remote patient monitoring without the initial investment.

Staff writer Audrey Kinsella profiles another monitoring system, this one with an accompanying emergency call center, that adult children can use to keep track of their distant parents' daily activities and respond as necessary. This one, from a North Carolina company known as SimplyHome, is a little different from the ones she has told us about in previous entries in this series.

Delta Health Technologies and HomecareCRM create an interface between their products to support sales and marketing activities.

Walking the exhibit hall floor at this year's ATA meeting, one cannot help but get the impression that remote patient monitoring technologies have come of age. At the same time, one cannot help but wonder whether home health care providers are going to notice in time to impact the coming hospital readmission crisis.

We walked the entire length of the exhibit hall at this year's ATA meeting. Here are some technology advancements and trends of note from Honeywell HomMed, VRI, American TeleCare and others. Plus a cool robot and a unique medication management dispenser.

According to guest author Scott Herrmann of Procura, mobile applications at the point of care can be like telephony systems on steroids. In this second in a series, he outlines clinical and financial advantages of equipping field staff with mobile applications running on wireless, cellular devices.

Founded and led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, NantWorks describes itself as created "to converge a wide range of technologies to transform scientific research and healthcare via an integrated, evidence-based, genomically-informed, personalized approach to the delivery of care and the development of next generation diagnostics and therapeutics." The company has added telehealth vendor Boston Life Labs to its growing stable of companies.