The future appears to be bright the ambulatory EHR market..
According to Frost & Sullivan's US Ambulatory Electronic Health Record Market: 2015-2020 report, the ambulatory EHR market is expected to grow by a whopping 30 percent throughout the next five years, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.3 percent. This projection comes after prior mass expansion of the market due to incentives from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The report goes on to say that individual EHRs will need to focus on solving the industry's most prevalent issues - ICD-10 and interoperability - if they want to be successful moving forward. Specifically, EHRs possessing the following capabilities will likely stand out from the rest of the pack:
- Coordinating care
- Enabling risk stratification
- Automating data entry
- Engaging patients
- Benchmarking clinical performances throughout the care ecosystem
Additionally, fully integrated, specialty specific EHR solutions like Nextech are expected to be in greater demand as the market evolves over the next few years.
"Overall, winners in the U.S. ambulatory EHR market will include disruptive, provider-oriented, specialty-specific, cost-competitive technology companies capable of juggling this industry’s unique combination of risks and rewards. "Additionally, companies providing products and services supporting clinical decisions and better streamline delivery of care will have an edge."
“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.”
The bright future for ambulatory EHRs shouldn't be much of a surprise considering the overall growth of the healthcare IT industry as a whole. Forbes, in fact, predicted healthcare IT to be the most profitable industry in the entire country with a whopping profit margin of 21.6 percent. Not to mention, this follows 2015, a year in which healthcare IT was the most profitable industry with a 21 percent profit marge, four percentage points higher than the second-highest industry.
Clearly, healthcare IT and specifically ambulatory EHRs are well-positioned for a strong future.
To read the full release, click here.