Significant Growth Potential Exists In Clinical, Business Intelligence Solutions Market

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

HIMSS Analytics’ Essentials Brief finds analytics vital to support the future healthcare organization.

Analytic solutions will be essential to support clinical, financial, and operational decision-making in the healthcare organizations of the future as the emphasis of healthcare changes from volume to value-based care according to the 2016 Essentials Brief: Clinical & Business Intelligence (C&BI) Study, a snapshot on the U.S. hospital analytics market. The report is an in-depth market research study focused on identifying salient topics in the healthcare IT space that highlight mind share, market share, and market opportunity of specific healthcare software technologies.

Despite the importance of these analytic and intelligence tools, market adoption has been modest to date and plans to make future investments in clinical and business intelligence solutions are uncertain, the report found. The study found respondents with a C&BI solution have limited tactical or inconsistent or uncoordinated efforts toward data governance within their organization. This suggests
“more work and/or increase in vendor product functionality needs to occur in managing clinical, financial, and organizational data.”

The 2016 Essentials Brief: Clinical & Business Intelligence Study offers insight from 155 hospital executives, clinical, financial, and operational department heads and IT personnel on their current C&BI usage as well as future plans for C&BI solution adoption.

“It is not surprising to see moderate adoption levels of clinical and business solutions, or minimal investment plans as organizations have been focused on other clinical areas,” says HIMSS Analytics Director of Research, Brendan FitzGerald. “However, with the shift to value-based care and the potential impact of predictive and prescriptive analytics on patient care, growth in this solution category should increase significantly in the next three to five years.”

The 2016 study include the following insights:

• current and future adoption of clinical and business intelligence solutions
• vendor market share, mind share and market opportunity in the clinical and business intelligence solution category
• study respondents currently with a clinical and business intelligence solution revealed limited tactical or inconsistent/uncoordinated efforts toward data governance within their organization
• more study respondents with a C&BI solution utilize embedded tools within their EHR/HIS versus a best-of-breed or self-developed solution for their analytical needs
• based upon the HIMSS Analytics Adoption Model for Analytics Maturity (AMAM), respondents self-qualified as having a relatively low level of organizational analytics maturity
• uncertainty around plans to purchase a C&BI solution remains high as organizations rely upon current tools to make clinical and business decisions and focus on upgrading other clinical areas