One day in the not-too-distant future a doctor will be able to monitor a patient’s vital statistics from 400 miles away.

Called telemedicine, or the practice of sending medical information through a wireless device, it’s one of the faster growing segments of the health care industry.

Telemedicine allows patients to send their important health statistics to a doctor or hospital instantly and can help avoid the cost of having a patient come to a doctor’s office for a check up.

“There’s a need in the marketplace to keep people out of the hospital and put them into a home environment,” said Kent Dicks, president and chief executive of telemedicine device company MedApps. “But doctors still want to know how their patients, especially the ones with chronic diseases, are doing on an ongoing basis.”

According to the American Telemedicine Association, the total amount of federal grants and contracts for telemedicine in 2003 was an estimated $270 million. But that number should grow significantly as major insurance carriers and Medicare start adding telemedicine to their reimbursement lists.

Since telemedicine was allowed for insurance reimbursement in 2001, several small startup companies have invented devices that do everything from a diabetes testing cell phone to wireless devices that track the pulse of a patient with heart disease.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based MedApps makes a device called the HealthPAL, which connects to off-the-shelf diabetes testing equipment and sends that information over the Internet to doctors’ offices and other medical databases like Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health.

The device, which is currently being tested at a hospital in Alabama, is expected to cost $400 with a monthly service charge of around $10-$20.

“It really acts a watch dog for the patients, especially the elderly or for children where an in-school nurse is no longer available,” Dicks said.

Another device created to wirelessly monitor blood glucose levels was made by a New Jersey-based company called HealthPia America, which invented a cell phone that also acts as a blood glucose meter.

The aptly-named GlucoPhone plugs into a cell phone and every time a patient tests their blood sugar the information is automatically sent from the phone to a medical database.

One problem with creating a telemedicine device, however, is the massive amount of platforms a single device has to work on.

The Continua Health Alliance was created last year by a group of health and technology companies, including General Electric (GE), IBM (IBM), Intel (INTC) and Nokia (NOK), to come up with a series of standards and practices for the telemedicine field. The organization is trying to create a set of user-friendly standards for the growing industry.

"There is a strong belief that this against population and the increasing predominance of diabetes, that we may not have enough doctors or nurses to treat the entire population," Dave Whitlinger, executive director of the Continua Health Alliance. "Health care is going to become more persona and more home based."