This year, cloud, mobile, social and big data will account for one-third of communication and technology spending and 100% of spending growth," says Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC. He recently revealed the findings of IDC Health Insights in an on-demand Web conference entitled 'IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Healthcare 2015 Predictions.'
The Web conference featured health industry analysts Scott Lundstrom, Lynne Dunbrack, Cynthia Burghard, Judy Hanover, Deanne Kasim, Sven Lohse, Max Clapps, Silvia Piai, Nino Gigusahvili, Alan Louie, Eric Newmark, and Sash Mukerjee, and provided organizations with insight and perspective on long-term industry trends along with new themes that may be on the horizon.
Among the predictions for this year:
Operational Inefficiencies Will Increase: 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.
Security Issues: By 2015, 50% of healthcare organizations will have experienced 1 to 5 cyber attacks in the previous 12 months with one-third of attacks deemed successful, requiring healthcare organizations to invest in a multi-prong security strategy to avoid disruptions to normal operations, fines and notification costs.
Personalized Patient Profiles: Driven by the increased pressure to improve quality and manage costs, 15% of hospitals will create a comprehensive patient profile by 2016 that will allow them to deliver personalized treatment plans.
In the Cloud: 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.
Mobility: 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.
Tele-monitoring Up: 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.
Reimbursement Models: As a result of increased pressures to deliver better outcomes of care, payers will implement newer reimbursement models for 35% of their payments to providers in North America within the next 36 months, resulting in related investments in quality measurement, payment, and billing systems.
Gens concludes that "to say 2015 will be a pivotal year in the ICT industry is a gross understatement."
