Telemedicine as Cisco Systems' seat at eHealth table

Donna Cusano

 ‘Those programs are part of Cisco’s push to compete with other major tech companies, including Intel, IBM and General Electric, in the growing market for health-care products and services. They’re also part of Cisco’s broader strategy to promote and participate in wider use of digital video across numerous segments of daily life – which can increase demand for Cisco’s core business of selling the networking equipment that carries those digital signals around the globe.’  A UnitedHealthcare executive (working with Cisco) believes that ‘Telemedicine is going be everywhere.  The only question is when.’  (‘When’ can be a mightly long time, but Frost & Sullivan estimated that the telemedicine market will be $6.1 billion in 2012.) So giants compete–which is good–adapting their current technology to healthcare or acquiring it, but rare is the story where a giant truly collaborates with a small company with an innovative eHealth technology (Novartis and Proteus come to mind).