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Countries around the world are rushing to implement digital transformation initiatives across their healthcare ecosystem. The ongoing pandemic has made clear the importance of modernizing healthcare IT and stakeholders are examining all possible opportunities with a sense of urgency.
This report explores the current healthcare IT landscape in Europe to identify future market drivers and the scope for third-party vendors.
Emerging Digital Themes in European Healthcare IT
We identified 4 digital themes that play a crucial role in the technological advancement of a healthcare IT.
1. Smart Care: Hospitals are looking for technology solutions that use patient data to help the doctors fine-tune their administrative processes.
- Early detection & diagnosis: Prevent clinical risk using algorithms on patient data
- Clinical support decision: Using CDSS to increase accuracy & speed of decision making
- Wellness & protection: Wellness apps and wearables for well-being
- Therapeutics/Chronic Disease management
2. Patient Information Management: Solutions that enable availability of patient information in all stages – from entry to exit – and the optimization of admission, scheduling and other processes around it that can result in seamless patient flow.
- EMR/EHR: Electronic patient data collection & storage
- CRM/Billing Systems: Financial accounting systems for hospitals
- Practice Management: Manage appointments, claims and statements, prescriptions, and reporting.
3. Remote Care: Introducing IoT devices to extend hospital borders and provide remote medical care.
- Virtual Care: Usage of digital platforms for interaction between physicians and patients
- Connected Home Health: Constant home monitoring and tracking patient’s progress
4. Intelligent Enterprise Systems: Includes end-to-end smart systems that control various functions critical for the operation of hospitals.
- Automation: Automating various processes to increase efficiency & performance
- Communication: Integrated devices which communicate for information
- Energy Management: Solutions to improve operational efficiency of a hospital
- Connectivity: Solutions that enable internal and external connectivity in hospitals
Region-Wise Breakdown of Healthcare IT in Europe
Given the above emerging digital themes, we analyzed the technology footprint across Europe and identified that the application of new-age digital themes like AI & Data Science-based clinical solutions were rising across regions.
In the Helsinki area of Finland which falls under the North Region, one of the key imperatives was the implementation of RPA, AI, and Process Re-engineering solutions. HUS, Orkla & Mehiläinen have technology centers in this region.
In Warsaw, Poland and Prague, Czechia which fall under the East Region, emerging workloads include IT process streamlining related to clinical trials. COVID-19 has shown us just how important this task is. Parexel is a key service provider in the development of clinical trial solutions in this region.
Solution providers, in turn, outsource their requirements to vendors from both European & non-European countries.
Healthcare IT Outsourcing Overview
Our primary analysis reveals that vendor engagements are highly concentrated on data warehousing, cloud migration, advanced analytics, application development, testing services and datacenter management.
Veteran service providers Cognizant, Infosys, HCL, Wipro and others are key vendors providing crucial digital services to European clients across all regions.
Primarily, the focus is on providing services in Application Development Management, Information Management Systems (IMS), Research & Analytics, Automation services and Customer Support Infrastructure.
IBM Watson Health, pioneers in AI healthcare have signed a partnership with HUG, Geneva to use IBM’s Watson for Genomics. The solution generates a report for oncologists that matches genetic alterations in a patient’s tumor with the most relevant therapies and clinical trials.
Infosys has developed an IMS to reduce the time taken to tabulate and make available financial information for Aetna, a managed care company.
The Future of Healthcare IT in Europe
Clearly, the focus is now on implementing new-age solutions like AI, Big Data, RPA & Data Science for efficient functioning of the ecosystem. However, this does not mean that traditional product engineering tasks have taken a backseat.
In the precision medicine field, the benefits of genetics, biology and technology like AI are combined to provide a holistic diagnostics view and care.
Cegedim, a health tech company headquartered in London, has announced an innovative collaboration on Real World Data for healthcare improvement in Europe with Sanofi. Cegedim will provide real-world datasets that can be leveraged by Health Data Experts and medical teams. The data processed using AI technologies will go a long way in improving patient care.
It’s not just in AI, such partnerships are being built in value-based healthcare & in integrated care domains too.
Digital Partner Strategy
Even existing digital solutions like Electronic Health Records (EHR) have been found to be lacking thus paving the way for third-party vendors to step in with innovative solutions.
Healthcare providers in Europe and even around the world are racing against the clock to accelerate innovation and transform their legacy IT landscape. Our comprehensive report on the European healthcare IT ecosystem shows a sustained effort on the part of stakeholders to embrace cutting-edge digital solutions. Vendors with a proven expertise in healthcare IT should turn their attention to the numerous opportunities emerging across MSAs in Europe.
