Global Healthcare Cloud Computing Market worth $5.4 Bn by 2017

Tuesday 11 September 2012, Amsterdam

Cloud technology in healthcare market can be segmented by applications, deployment models, service models, pricing models, and components. Applications in healthcare are of two main types; Clinical Information Systems (CIS) and Non Clinical Information Systems (NCIS). CIS includes EMR, CPOE, PACS, RIS, LIS, PIS, and others while NCIS includes Revenue Cycle Management, Automatic Patient Billing, cost accounting, payroll management, and claims management.

Private, public, and hybrid clouds are the three deployment models across the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry has been slow to adopt public clouds due to its highly regulated nature where as the private and hybrid cloud models have a higher affinity. The healthcare cloud market by service models is further classified into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The market is dominated by SaaS providers such as Carestream Health, Inc. and GE Healthcare (U.K.).

Cloud computing is a utility based or pay-per-use type of a service and the market can be categorized by two types of pricing models offered by the service vendors, the pay-as-you-go model and the subscription-based or spot pricing model. The fifth segmentation of the market is by its components namely, software, hardware, and services.

The market is witnessing a surge in the adoption of technology and cloud computing is expected to bring about a revolution in the healthcare IT market. Healthcare organizations are expected to deliver more while limiting healthcare costs at the same time. Despite this a few factors restrain the growth of this market with security and privacy concerns being the primary reasons for slow adoption of this technology.

Cloud computing is estimated to serve as a boon to the healthcare industry and the market is witnessing an increased adoption of this technology. In 2011, the penetration of cloud in healthcare was approximately 4%. A large number of HCOs are allocating funds for migration to cloud computing in the next five years.