Healthcare Analytics: Market Growth Charges Forward Despite Adoption Challenges

The global healthcare analytics market is expected to grow 26.5 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $18.7 billion in 2020, according to market research company MarketsandMarkets.  A competing report by BCC Research has similar findings, estimating that the market will grow from $5.7 billion this year to $16.9 billion in 2020, a 24 percent growth rate.

Neha Maliwal, BCC Research analyst, said that “payer-provider convergence and rising healthcare costs along with the other market drivers are creating many opportunities that are boosting the healthcare analytics market.  These factors include EHRs increasing data volumes, the rising importance of value-based medicine due to peer pressure, health information exchange (HIE), easy to handle big data, emergency care and preventive care, time and cost savings, data clarity, and transparency and fraud detection.”

Trey La Charite, medical director for clinical integration at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, Tenn, said that “I think this predictive analytics tool is bringing together quality health with financial stability and isolating it away from the providers, which free them to do what they do best, which is keep patients healthy.”

But analytics in the healthcare field is difficult.  A study by HIMSS Analytics found that many healthcare providers have a difficult time of getting end users on board, and that the analytics work that is being done now is very superficial compared to the potential locked up within much of the clinical data that providers hold.  69 percent of those surveyed said that they were committed to analytics and are formulating strategies or have already started running pilots, but it may be some time before the use of analytics goes mainstream.

David Bolton, Global Director of Healthcare Industry Solutions for Qlik, said that “while analytics is front and center in healthcare, maturity can vary by solution areas – driven in large part by local and regional pressures.”

William Moschella, Evariant CEO and co-founder, said that “healthcare providers are faced with tremendous challenges as they balance the transition from volume to value-based organizations.  Hospitals need access to big data, analytics and digital communication capabilities to turn clinical data into meaningful insights that drive proactive conversations.”