Electronic Health Reporter

Cloud computing services are increasingly moving into the future in healthcare. However, the protection and security of private data are two of the main reasons why the healthcare sector is generally slow to adopt new technologies. According to market researchers at MarketsandMarkets, healthcare will invest $5.4 billion in the cloud by 2017.

The “Healthcare Cloud Computing (Clinical, EMR, SaaS, Private, Public, Hybrid) Market – Global Trends, Challenges, Opportunities & Forecasts (2012 – 2017)” analyzes and studies the major market drivers, restraints and opportunities in North America, Europe, Asia. According to the report, Market researchers estimate that last year at least 4 percent of healthcare is in the cloud. This year, this share is expected to grow to 20.5 percent.

According to Cloud Times, “Cloud computing offers significant benefits to the healthcare sector; doctor’s clinics, hospitals and clinics require quick access to computing and large storage facilities which are not provided in the traditional settings, moreover healthcare data needs to be shared across various settings and geographies which further burdens the healthcare provider and the patient causing significant delay in treatment and loss of time. Cloud caters to all these requirements thus providing the healthcare organizations an incredible opportunity to improve services to their customers, the patients, to share information more easily than ever before, and improve operational efficiency at the same time.”

MarketsandMarkets divided the health care market for the study in two areas, clinical and non-clinical. The clinical applications include software for the pharmaceutical industry, image viewing and processing as well as the patient record and the electronic health record. Non-clinical applications relate to the receivables management, patient accounting and financial management. One possible advantage to migrate the electronic health record in a cloud would be that the information of different facilities such as hospitals and doctors would be accessible regardless of location.

The market is further segmented into applications, deployment models, service models, pricing models, and components. Private, public and hybrid clouds are the three deployment models across the healthcare industry. 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 CareCloud (U.S.), Carestream Health, Inc. (U.S.), Merge Healthcare, Inc. (U.S.), GE Healthcare (U.K.) and Agfa Healthcare (Belgium).

All the above factors bring the market for cloud computing to grow at 20.5 percent from 2012 to 2017 in healthcare. ITaaS, a combination of software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service, would save $11 billion to healthcare organizations, or 9 percent, of their costs over the next three years, according to a recent report by MeriTalk.