Nearshore Americas

IT Outsourcing Booms in Healthcare Sector as Hospitals Go High-Tech

Fear of cyber attacks and constantly changing regulatory laws are forcing a large number of healthcare companies to outsource their IT management, according to research by TechNavio. While some organizations are only outsourcing a few applications, others are handing out the responsibility of overseeing their entire IT infrastructure.

The research firm expects IT outsourcing in the global healthcare and life sciences sector to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 8.6%  through 2019. A major trend is that many firms are hosting themselves on the cloud to make their operations safer.

As expected, healthcare providers are increasingly realizing that IT outsourcing can free them to focus on their core business. “IT outsourcing also reduces operational and maintenance costs and enables healthcare providers to focus on core business areas and deal with the complexities of patient care more efficiently,” TechNavio noted.

Changing government regulations are leading hospitals and clinics to outsource functions such as finance and accounting, business application management and database management. The report – which counts Accenture, Cognizant, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell as major service providers for the healthcare sector – also points to a rise in the use of predictive and content analytics for clinical and operational insights.

To take advantage of the growing interest in Big Data, the report says, vendors are offering analytics-as-a-service technologies.

The report comes a month after IDC predicted that by 2018 half of health and life science buyers will demand substantial risk sharing with outsourcing partners. IDC believes that, in the months ahead, operational inefficiency will become critical at 25% of hospitals, resulting in the development of a data-driven digital hospital strategy.

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Therefore, over the next three years, 70% of healthcare organizations worldwide are expected to invest in consumer-facing mobile applications, wearables, remote health monitoring, and virtual care, which will create more demand for Big Data and analytics capabilities to support population health management initiatives.

Narayan Ammachchi

News Editor for Nearshore Americas, Narayan Ammachchi is a career journalist with a decade of experience in politics and international business. He works out of his base in the Indian Silicon City of Bangalore.

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