EHR Market To Expand By A Third By 2020
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
A Frost and Sullivan report predicts that, by the year 2020, the EHR market will have grown 30 percent.
By the year 2020, the EHR market is expected to grow 30 percent from its current size. According to Frost & Sullivan, this growth will take place despite challenges including frequent EHR audits, high implementation costs, low productivity, and poor interoperability standards.
EHR Intelligence reports EHRs with the following capabilities will most likely be the most successful in the growing market:
- automating data entry
- enabling risk stratification
- coordinating care
- engaging patients
- benchmarking clinical performances throughout the care ecosystem
“Revenue growth will peak during 2019 to 2020 as more ambulatory practices are expected to embrace more expensive, integrated EHRs,” said Frost & Sullivan Transformational Health Senior Research Analyst Koustav Chatterjee in a press release. “With healthcare providers’ desire to benchmark outcomes at a network, practice and patient level, their need for integrated EHRs will only grow.”
According to iHealth Beat, the report also predicts large ambulatory practices will continue to acquire smaller practices or work with accountable care organizations, in turn helping them invest in EHRs. Additionally, payer consolidation will address fragmentation among consumers and ambulatory EHR vendors.
“Vendors are focusing on software as a service (SaaS) based EHRs due to increasing cost pressures as well as the low productivity and return on investment efficiency of on-premise solutions,” noted Chatterjee. “Not only are cloud EHRs less expensive than on-premise solutions, they are also easily implemented, interoperable, auto-scalable, remotely accessible and compatible with disparate healthcare systems.”