Netgain

Earlier this year Robert E. Watson, president and CEO, Streamline Health wrote an article for Healthcare IT News in which he discussed the exploding growth of IT in healthcare applications.  In this article he states, “In a matter of years, the healthcare industry has changed from measuring the size of data in terabytes and petabytes to exabytes and even zettabytes—and this volume of data is doubling every year.”

This rapid increase in Healthcare IT (HIT) volume could well be one of the key reasons for an increased trend for hospitals toward outsourcing these functions.  An article in Becker’s Hospital Review last fall indicated that “The U.S. healthcare IT outsourcing market is expected to grow by 42.8 percent in the next five years”.

In August 2013, MarketsandMarkets released a report that states healthcare organizations in North America will increase information technology (IT) outsourcing spending from $35 billion in 2013, to $50.4 billion in 2018--a 7.6% annual growth rate.  Legal and regulatory requirements are some of the key drivers fueling healthcare IT spending.  Other allocations include business software, productivity applications, business intelligence and database, and technology and system management.