Health IT outsourcing poised for growth in 2015, beyond

The market for IT outsourcing in healthcare and life sciences is expected increase at an 8.6 percent compound annual growth rate through 2019, with the adoption of cloud-based services among the major trends, according to global research firm TechNavio.

Organizations might be outsourcing just a few applications or their whole IT operations, relying on managed services to eliminate the need for an in-house IT staff. IT outsourcing helps healthcare providers to deploy business applications rapidly and focus on their core business.

Hospitals and clinics, which have difficulty keeping with up myriad changing government regulations, tend to outsource applications related to operations, finance, database management and infrastructure, according to the report. This outsourcing helps to reduce operational and maintenance costs.

The report also points to the rise in use of predictive and content analytics for clinical and operational insights.

By 2020, 80 percent of healthcare data will pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime as providers increasingly turn to the cloud for data collection, aggregation, analytics and decision-making, IDC Health Insights recently predicted.

IDC also estimated that half of health and life science buyers by 2018 will demand substantial risk sharing with their outsourcing partners.

Hospitals increasingly plan to outsource coding efforts in the coming year, according to a survey published by Black Book Rankings, which found in a separate survey that a majority of hospital CFOs plan to either outsource or purchase new revenue cycle management software by the end of 2015.

Dick Escue, CIO of Valley View Hospital in Colorado, made the case for buying effective services, not mega-expensive hardware, in a November article published at Becker's Health IT CIO Review.

Yet Peter Odegard, information security officer at Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, told FierceHealthIT that it's increasingly difficult for hospitals to keep track of all the vendor partners that host, store or analyze data, adding to the complexity of security patient data.

To learn more:
- check out the report