Courtesy of FierceMobileHealthcare:

The Department of Veterans Affairs this week awarded contracts to six IT vendors to run its massive (and growing) telehealth program for the next five years. The winners: Authentidate, American Telecare, Cardiocom, HealthHero Network, Visual Telecommunication Network/ViTelCare, and Viterion TeleHealthcare.

The prize: About $1.38 billion in VA telehealth contracts. The individual vendor contracts run anywhere from $150 million to $372 million over the five-year period, VA officials tellFierceMobileHealthcare. That total isn't guaranteed, though. Each vendor starts out with a single-year contract, which is renewable in each of the following four years.

What's really interesting: The VA's clear leap into telehealth. The smallest of the new contracts--$150 million for Viterion Tele-Healthcare--is just shy of the agency's entire telehealth budget of$163 million last year. It is somewhat on trend, though, given that the 2010 budget was a 50 percent jump over 2009 spending.

The contracts do cover both traditional video-based telehealth systems, according to Authentidate officials. They also cover sensor-based remote monitoring systems in patient homes.

To learn more:
- read Authentidate's press release
- check out MobileHealthWatch's coverage

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