US Healthcare Integration Market to Reach $2B by 2027: Greatest Opportunities for Growth Outside of Clinic

Healthcare data liquidity enters a new phase as healthcare enterprises seek alternatives to prevailing industry integration and development products and services from an expanding variety of IT vendors

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Chilmark Research

Apr 15, 2021, 07:33 ET

BOSTON, April 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Chilmark Research's latest report, Integration Infrastructure: Building 21st Century Health Information Technology, captures a market transitioning to new approaches to development and integration, enabling more effective access to data across organizations and applications. This market for integration technology and services will amount to $2.09 billion by 2026, representing a 14% CAGR. However, non-traditional sectors, including Life Sciences, will grow far faster (3-4 times the rate of traditional buyers) and will amount to the largest single market for this technology by 2026.

Providers and Payers Want Alternatives
While much attention has been focused on how the 21^st Century Cures Act will expand data availability across healthcare, the new rules are just one of the reasons that the industry is looking to leverage data across applications and organizations in new ways. Faster and less costly alternatives to existing integration techniques and approaches have also emerged in response to several factors: the maturation of FHIR, broader acceptance of API-based development and integration, changing payment models, new pressures to deliver quality care at lower cost, and the long-term effects of the pandemic.

Traditional EHR integrations, built as one-off interfaces that require ongoing and expensive maintenance, are giving way to API-based access to data and transactions for new projects. This approach to implementing integrations is gaining acceptance as a more effective method than event-driven and messaging-based approaches. These new integrations can be built by organizations and/or their vendors; alternatively, an organization can subscribe to integrations delivered as a service. While the usage of APIs is still in its infancy, many vendors are significantly enhancing their API-related services and tools in addition to expanding their API catalogs.

Organizations need to blend data from many internal and outside sources and provide them on demand rather than on a schedule. Data aggregation, until now mostly a precursor for analytics and reporting applications, is important for a more diverse set of applications and range of access requirements. Building the data stores behind APIs, creating cohort-level data on demand, and supporting analytics on demand are examples of growing market needs.

Finally, integrating data and functionality directly into clinical and administrative workflows is the most promising way to address clinician burden. Organizations and vendors need ways to experiment and iterate to have a realistic chance of delivering improved workflows.

Future Use Cases and Future Vendors
New integration technologies are also being adapted to a range of novel use cases. For example, for many products and services that will support prior authorization interactions between payers and providers, FHIR-standard APIs will be the technological centerpiece.

The building of new price transparency tools for members and patients will be greatly aided by the products and services described in this report. These offerings will take full advantage of the more expansive data disclosures from providers and payers planned for the coming years. In addition, many providers and payers will use the data aggregation capabilities highlighted in this report to harness the new data, contributing to a better understanding of their pricing position compared to similar local organizations.

This report also looks closely at some of the offerings of the public cloud vendors. These companies are already well established in healthcare as providers of hosted computer and storage services. Their general-purpose development and integration capabilities are also used in healthcare. Increasingly, they are touting their healthcare-specific development and integration capabilities, a leading indicator of their larger ambitions to contribute to healthcare.

Integration in Healthcare Set to Expand Dramatically
The report includes a forecast of total spending by healthcare enterprises (providers, payers, and healthcare-oriented ISVs) on integration products and services over the next five years. It has a separate forecast of potential spending by non-traditional users of these tools such as life sciences, clinical research, and digital health vendors.

This report is available to select subscribers of the Chilmark Advisory Service or can be purchased separately. To learn more, please view the report page. Direct inquiries for purchase, and all other inquiries about the report should be addressed to John Moore III at [email protected].

The report has detailed profiles of the relevant offerings from these vendors: Allscripts, AWS, CareEvolution, Cerner, Epic, Google Cloud, Health Catalyst, InterSystems, Lyniate, Microsoft Azure, NextGen (Mirth), Orion Health, Philips, and Redox.

Media Contact:
John Moore III
[email protected]

SOURCE Chilmark Research