The healthcare industry has seen a tremendous amount of disruption in recent years, owing both to the creation of technology like cloud computing and the regulations passed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Fueled by both of these forces, healthcare has surged into the future era while outpacing many other industries when it comes to investing in IT, healthcare market research and advanced computing solutions.
To give you a firm idea of what the state of healthcare technology spending is now and where it may lead in the future, here are some insights courtesy of healthcare market research firms:
IT Spending on the Rise
- Overall, healthcare providers spend $40 billion annually on IT programs
- Clinical healthcare IT spending alone reached $15.6 billion in 2014
○ This number increased by $1.5 billion compared to 2013
- Federal healthcare IT spending is predicted to exceed $4.8 billion in 2019
- Upgrading the Department of Defense’s EHR management system will be predicted to cost about $11 billion
- Electronic Health Records — whose adoption was encouraged by the ACA — currently make up 61.5 percent of clinical healthcare IT expenditures
○ Telemedicine is the second-highest healthcare IT investment spend with 23 percent of the market
○ Picture archiving and communications systems are third-highest at 7.8 percent
- BBC Research estimates compound annual growth rates (CAGR) for IT spending increases between now and 2019 at 4.8 percent; MedGadget predicts a CAGR of 6.01 percent
- “Hospitals continue to see opportunities to invest in clinical and business systems to become more efficient and improve services.” — John Longwell, VP of research at Computer Economics
Areas of Biggest Growth for Health Care IT
- Technavio predicts that the healthcare big data market will grow 42 percent overall by 2019, a 10.5 percent CAGR
- Services will comprise 52 percent of big data/analytics spend
- The Americas currently have the lion’s share of big data spend in healthcare at 63 percent of the global market
- MedGadget healthcare market research indicates a 21.95 percent CAGR for spending in healthcare cloud computing between now and 2019
○ They also predict the remote healthcare delivery system known as Connected Health M2M to have a CAGR of 33.08 percent
○ Their estimates for healthcare 3D printing spending increases amount to 14.74 percent CAGR
- Healthcare big data analytics are expected to eventually reduce total U.S. health expenses by $300 to $450 billion
Global Snapshot of Healthcare IT Spending
- IDC Health Insights predicts that Western European healthcare IT spending will grow to $14.6 billion in 2018
○ The UK is currently the biggest health care IT market
○ Germany is in second with a growth rate of 3 percent
- Overall healthcare spending for Western Europe is predicted to tick down 1 percent by 2017
- Gartner revealed that healthcare providers in the Middle East and North Africa spent $3 billion on IT products and services in 2014
- Gartner also predicts that healthcare providers in India will spend $1.2 billion on IT services in 2015, which is a 7 percent increase from the year before
As you can see, the healthcare industry is keen to ramp up their technology investments in years to come. You can access your own insights into how hospitals and healthcare providers will be investing in the days ahead with some well-designed market research. Consider using our guide to field data collection to gather the best data possible on where healthcare will invest as they move towards the future.
