The rapid growth of clinical and consumer health information technology has kept pace into 2015, fueled largely by the billions of dollars hospitals and clinics are investing in electronic health records.
According to a report on health care information technology by BBC Research, a market research firm, the market for clinical health IT grew to $15.6 billion in 2014, an increase of $1.5 billion over the previous year. The firm projects the market for healthcare IT to continue to grow faster than the overall U.S. economy in the coming years, pegging the industry's anticipated compound annual growth rate between now and 2019 at 4.8 percent.
It's no mystery what product is driving the growth: Electronic health records (EHRs), which account for 61.5 percent of the clinical health care IT market. EHRs have been on a tear since they received two big government-backed nudges into the economy in the first two years of the Obama administration, first with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which put $17 billion toward promotion of EHRs, and later with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which also incentivized health providers to switch to electronic records.
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The rapid growth of EHRs over the past few years, spurred by the stimulus and health care legislation, represents a sharp break from what BBC describes as "years of incremental steps towards a national healthcare IT infrastructure" in previous years. The research agency lauds the growth in clinical health care IT as representing a great opportunity to help health providers deliver services more efficiently, but also highlights the business opportunity the trend represents for IT providers vying for a slice of the $40 billion that healthcare providers spend on all types of healthcare IT annually.
At 23 percent, telemedicine represents the next largest chunk of the health care IT market, followed by picture archiving and communications systems (PACS), which has a 7.8 percent share of the market.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
