Hospitals to Increase IT Investments to Meet Operational Inefficiencies

November 21, 2014, 07:08 AM

Filed Under: Healthcare

Related: Cloud Computing, Healthcare, IDC, IT Assets, Mobile Apps, Technology

IDC Health Insights presented its 2015 healthcare predictions, based on a new IDC FutureScape report, in an on-demand Web conference. The Web conference provided insights and perspectives on long-term industry trends along with new themes that may be on the horizon.

Excerpts from the predictions include:

With healthcare costs rising, operational inefficiency will become critical at 25% of hospitals, resulting in the development of a data-driven digital hospital strategy requiring budget in 2016.

By 2020, 80% of healthcare data will pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime, as providers seek to leverage cloud-based technologies and infrastructure for data collection, aggregation, analytics, and decision-making.

As a result of an increased focus on improving the consumer experience, 65% of consumer transactions with healthcare organizations will be mobile by 2018, thus requiring healthcare organizations to develop omni-channel strategies to provide a consistent experience across the Web, mobile, and telephonic channels.

To control spiraling healthcare costs related to managing patients with chronic conditions, 70% of healthcare organizations worldwide will invest in consumer-facing mobile applications, wearables, remote health monitoring, and virtual care by 2018, which will create more demand for big data and analytics capability to support population health management initiatives.

Building on continuing technology innovation and the increasing use of knowledge-based workflows and actionable analytics, more than 50% of big data issues will be reduced to routine operational IT by 2018, reducing the need for specialized IT resources to support big data.

"These decision imperatives provide a road map for healthcare organizations to think about IT investments that will need to be made and the impact they will have on an organization, all of which can be used to support the planning and budgeting process," said Scott Lundstrom, Group Vice President and General Manager of IDC Health Insights. "Common themes emerging from the FutureScape include the focus on consumer experience and engagement, the use of mobile and internet enabled devices, and of course, the 3rd Platform technologies."

To read the full press release featuring all predictions, click here.