Value-based care initiatives ranked as the top driver for healthcare technology spending in 2018, according to a recent survey from Illinois-based Damo Consulting.
Researchers associated with the survey, which polled a wide range of technology firms, from global brands to VC-funded digital health startups, noted that at this time last year, the Presidential election happened right in the middle of the 2017 survey. As such, researchers saw an interesting shift in the responses, with last year a large majority of respondents citing the results of the election as a huge risk for the healthcare markets.
But this year, fears have faded, Damo officials say. “In the contrary, the survey responses reinforce the shift towards value-based care as the main driver for growth. Data and analytics shows up as the single biggest spend category, surpassing digital health which was the top spend category in last year’s survey. The increasing focus on AI and cognitive in unlocking insights to drive improved healthcare delivery may be a factor in this shift.”
The data showed that value-based care initiatives (60.5 percent) tied closely with patient engagement and care management initiatives (57.9 percent) as the major drivers of technology spending in 2018. While IT and data security remain big concerns for healthcare, about 40 percent of respondents said cybersecurity and ransomware are drivers for technology spend.
As far as which technology areas will see increased spend in 2018, data and analytics were by far the biggest area identified by survey respondents (76 percent). Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents believe that AI and cognitive will witness an increase in spend in 2018, followed by digital health (44.7 percent).
Meanwhile, a majority (60.5 percent) of respondents said they considered a lack of enterprise readiness for new technologies to be the biggest headwind for growth in healthcare IT spend. Half of respondents said they believe interoperability challenges to be the second biggest obstacle in the IT spend growth in healthcare.
What’s more, a majority of the respondents are looking at growth in healthcare. A little over half (52.6 percent) expect 10 to 30 percent growth, and a quarter (26.3 percent) are confident of more than 30 percent growth in healthcare in 2018. A small percentage of respondents (5.2 percent) expect to see a negative growth in healthcare.
Interestingly, the data showed that the rise of non-traditional players in healthcare (Amazon, Apple and Google) is the most important factor (36.8 percent of respondents) impacting the competitive environment in 2018. And, according to the respondents, M&A and consolidation among technology providers (31.6 percent), the growing influence of major EHR vendors (31.6 percent), and pursuit of market share growth among existing vendors (31.6 percent) were seen as equally important factors driving the competitive environment.
