Through rolling out favorable policies and maintaining a strong emphasis on its IT and health sector, the healthcare analytics market will see tremendous growth in the coming years.
COVID-19 raised the world's awareness of the significance of data-driven medical care and decisions. The prediction models created by experts during the pandemic, for example, were able to successfully estimate the emergence of subsequent waves of COVID-19 spread in different regions of the world. And the market for big data in the health industry has since begun to snowball. As a result, the healthcare analytics market in the world was estimated at USD 21.1 billion in 2021. By 2026, it is expected to reach USD 75.1 billion with a CAGR of 28.9%.
The Asia Pacific region only accounts for roughly 7.5% of the global healthcare analytics market in 2022. But drastic development in the region's IT sector and tech innovations indicates much room for growth. In addition, China, likely to benefit from its large population and favorable policies, is advantageous to expand its market share in the region and the globe.
Increase operation efficiency through analytics
Healthcare analytics can leverage historical and current data to offer comprehensive insight into patients' conditions. The practice also provides insight into how healthcare providers can boost their productivity, reduce cost, and improve general performance. As a result, Healthcare analytics is vastly beneficial to the health industry, especially in the digital era.
In the progressively digitized health industry, healthcare analytics can increase the sector's operational efficiency. The amount of data in the world grew by 5,000% from 2010 to 2020. Without proper tools, the data can become a burden that hinders research efficiency, model-building, and decision-making processes. However, data can be treasured commodities if correctly leveraged. Converting the data into valuable insight requires proper analytics, where healthcare analytics come in. For example, during the pandemic, healthcare analytics proved to be beneficial in managing patient data and bed allocation. Types of healthcare analytics can be generally narrowed down to descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, and discovery analytics.
EHR-driven growth
Spurred by the rising adoption of EHR (electronic health record), healthcare analytics witnessed innovations and developments that contributed to the growth of its market. EHR helps automate routine functions of providers' workflow; its implementation has allowed the healthcare analytics market to takeoff. A study shows that the EHR adoption rate has flourished in developing and developed countries. For example, China's adoption rate of EHR grew from 18.6% to 85.3% from 2007 to 2018, while the adoption rate in the US grew from 9.4% to 96% from 2008 to 2017. Despite that China showed a slower adoption rate, the average number of hospitals in China adopting EHR was 1,500 per year, whereas, in the US, it was at 534. This means that China has more hospitals to cover. Overall, the increased adoption rate of EHR around the globe will have a positive impact on the healthcare analytics market.
By turning papers into interactive data, EHR helps to gather data necessary for all types of healthcare analytics, thereby completing what would be hours of tedious paperwork in just the blink of an eye. The more data generated from EHR adoption in hospitals, the more resources are available to the healthcare analytics market.
China's position
China's long-term investment and research in the health and AI sector have put the country in an advantageous position to reap the rewards of healthcare analytics. Healthcare has always been a priority for the government. According to studies done by AskCI, the health industry in China is expected to reach CNY 12.7 trillion by 2022 under favorable policies like Health China Operations and The 14th Five Year Plan. Government funding was pivotal in transforming traditional medical practices into data-driven fields that utilize healthcare analytics to increase efficiency and accuracy in the industry. Since the 12th Five Year Plan, the central government has invested over CNY 10 billion in 'health informatization,' which augmented the role of technology in healthcare. By 2017, China's increasing funding closed the gap between China and the US in R&D funding, making the US no longer the 'uncontested leader' that it's been for decades.
Research that helped propel innovations for healthcare analytics also drastically rose in output under the central government's emphasis. As a result, China overtook the US in the number of research papers published in the combined field of computer science, AI, and biomedical engineering in 2012. By 2019, China was publishing around one-third more papers than the US. In addition, the enormous amount of data stored on the billions of people in China provided vital insights for research.
More companies are using healthcare analytics to curb costs in China. Ping An HealthKonnect's chief medical officer Zheng Yi, said, " In 2017, our health analytic-driven interventions resulted in significant cost reduction and brought the annual cost trend from 23% down to -1%." The analytics programs help with medical purposes and can also prevent fraud and abuse. For example, at HealthKonnect, the analytic model can identify fraud patterns and translate its findings to rules. These rules are then embedded into the hospital monitoring system for utilization review.
Outlook
The healthcare analytics market is on pace for immense growth in the future. However, the disconnect between hospitals may hinder China's progress towards healthcare digitization. According to theBMJ, China has over 300 commercial providers that use different healthcare systems with various technical structures and data standards. Therefore, hospitals need to figure out an approach to allow interoperability between them to capture the benefits of big data in healthcare. In addition, a large volume of data generated from millions of patients may pose a challenge to existing healthcare analytics programs. But with continued investment in IT and healthcare, China is looking at tremendous development in its healthcare analytics market.