Data warehousing and mining appear to be on the rise, however, while clinical data warehousing and analysis continue to lag far behind that of financial data mining. The same is true of bar coding in the pharmacy and at the bed side. Although both are on the rise, bar coding in the pharmacy far outpaces that of bedside administration applications. HIE adoption among hospitals has grown rapidly over the past six years from just over eight percent of hospitals reporting HIE capabilities in 2006 to greater than 25 percent of hospitals stating that they have the capability today. It is also one of the growing areas reported in the “planning to participate” area of last year’s survey, with over 18 percent of the facilities reporting that they are planning to participate in health information exchange in the coming years.
The top ten areas for IT purchasing in 2011
Of most interest to IT vendors, but also for hospital CIOs, is to see where are the buying trends, and in what areas hospitals have indicated they are going to spend future dollars in medical applications. Here is this year’s top ten list with the percentage of hospitals planned investment in 2011:
- CPOE – 4.14%
- Physician documentation – 3.59%
- eMAR – 2.88%
- Clinical Decision Support Systems – 2.41%
- Nursing documentation – 2.41%
- Clinical Data Repository – 2.35%
- Order Entry (not sure how this differs from CPOE) – 2.35%
- Pharmacy management – 2.07%
- Medication reconciliation – 2.05%
- General ledger – 2.03%
CPOE, eMAR, Clinical Data Repository and Nursing Documentation are the only systems that remain on the list compared to the top ten list of 2006.
What is on the Horizon? Glimmers
The three main glimmers on the horizon according to HIMSS analytics revolve around mobility, interoperability and adoption of EHRs. Using a FirstWordSM Dossier report of 2010 entitled “Trends in Mobile Medicine: Smartphone Apps for Physicians (Market Intelligence Report), Daniels and Hoyt reported that there are more wireless subscriber connections in the United States than there are people. The same report stated that 72 percent of U.S. physicians own a smart phone with about two thirds of all physicians using that device for online content of a professional nature. Almost 95 percent of all physicians use some “app” for medical information. There are indications that the $2.7 million market of 2007 could develop into a $9.6 billion (yes billion) market by the end of 2012 because of the medical applications currently flooding the market.