Global Electronic Health Record (EHR) Market 2009-2013

Date - 20 April 2010    No of Pages - 24

The adoption of EHR is increasingly gaining momentum in the healthcare organizations. An EHR system establishes a more efficient and effective information infrastructure that improves clinical documentation and enhances patient care & safety. This is because digital records can integrate various tasks and are more efficiently manageable than paper records. Moreover, in the current global medical environment, EHR systems help in coordinating the appointments of international patients (who travel to various treatment centers). This can be accounted to the advantages of EHR being able to provide seamless connectivity to many electronic medical record systems; offering secure access to patient health information. Therefore, EHR is becoming a strategic priority for hospitals to deliver safe, higher quality and cost effective care.

Further, EHR facilitates integration of information between the various healthcare service providers across the hospitals implementing the software in a region, a country or across the world. In addition, the hospitals' effort to become patient-centric, enhance patient safety and better manage their resources is likely to continue to drive the demand for EHR.

The high upfront costs involved to implement and maintain the technology, coupled with lack of IT resources, hinder the growth of EHR. However, SaaS (Software as a Service) based EHR provides the best approach for small hospitals and solo physicians offices. A subscription-based SaaS EHR becomes much easier and cost effective for buyers, as EHR vendor hosts the solution. Further, speech recognition tool is also gaining importance during the adoption of EHR system. This is because speech recognition facilitates direct feed into the patient health record. Thus, eliminating the lag time of transcription, enabling the physicians to easily navigate through the EHR system. Thus, the EHR vendors need to update their EHR product portfolio and include SaaS and speech recognition in order to grab the EHR market opportunity.

With the economic downturn, the operating IT budgets of the healthcare organizations has been affected. This has led to reduced IT investments. Thus, resulting in extension of implementation time on existing projects and delay on new capital projects. However, the worldwide government support and standardization of EHR system is expected to offer potential opportunity in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Market.

The report by Technavio highlights scope of the Global Electronic Health Record (EHR) market, along with trends, drivers, growth inhibitors and a few major vendors in the market.

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