EHRs are the first area where European healthcare providers are planning to invest during 2015 and beyond, according to a new survey from IDC Health Insights. The survey found 66% of survey respondents are planning to invest more in new solutions (especially non-hospital providers), either replacing the current solution or implementing it for the first time. The study describes European healthcare providers’ investment trends on enterprise solutions and healthcare-specific solutions. It also elaborates on decision-making structures and processes, and European healthcare providers’ IT budget management and alignment with business priorities.
The survey results are analyzed in a new IDC study, What Will European Healthcare Providers’ IT Investments Look Like? An IDC Health Insights Survey (IDC Health Insights #HIOH02X, April 2015).
The report finds the following key drivers that are changing the IT investment priorities of European healthcare providers:
– slow but necessary transition toward integrated care delivery models
– higher care quality and safety requirements
– numerous healthcare reforms and innovation initiatives are changing
As a result, healthcare providers are increasingly aware of the general changes brought by integrated care, but, as survey results show, they are less ready to focus on specific, practical initiatives that will accelerate the alignment of IT projects with business use cases.
Key findings of the survey include:
– European healthcare executives are prioritizing the provision of consistent and reliable collaboration platforms for their organization.
– Top IT investment areas include general collaboration solutions such as unified communications and industry-specific solutions such as EHRs.
– Investments supporting information management and analysis, such as document life-cycle management and business intelligence and analytics, are still relatively low — potentially jeopardizing the return of other investments, as in the case of clinical decision support, for example.
– Healthcare providers need to focus more on how both enterprise business solutions and healthcare industry-specific solutions will integrate with agile analytics-driven, mobile-first, and in the longer term cloud-first environments that are the basic condition to enable healthcare digital transformation.
