The need for cost-effective and flexible solutions to meet evolving enterprise imaging requirements is set to propel the adoption of cloud-based medical imaging informatics toward an estimated $830.5 million global market value by 2021.

Revenue is expected to grow from its 2016 worth of $285.4 million, at a compound annual growth rate of 23.8 percent, increasing the contribution of cloud-based solutions from the 3.8 percent standing of the overall imaging informatics market today, of which a few mid-sized and small vendors are the main players, according to an analysis published by research firm Frost & Sullivan.

“The mid-sized vendors that embraced the cloud early on and the small ones that are completely cloud-based are the ones that advance use cases for cloud the fastest,” Nadim Daher, industry principal of medical imaging and imaging informatics for Frost & Sullivan, told HCB News. “These use cases are getting more and more into the daily work of highly paid and highly valued specialists, whereas in the past the cloud has been used more for IT support, such as externalizing things that IT had to care about, that the actual doctors or patients didn’t need to know about.”

The synergistic convergence of cloud-based technology with advanced imaging analytics, machine learning, imaging research, interoperability standards, and health care blockchains is projected to open new applications over the next few years for stakeholders in medical imaging.

The deployment of cloud-based platforms through software-as-a-service, subscription or hybrid cloud currently provides new market access for imaging application developers, expands the prospective user base and breaks down many barriers faced in adoption for imaging providers.

Vendors and end users do face challenges derived from the shifts of imaging informatics, which includes going from capital-intensive to operation expenditure and from on-premise to hosted models, thereby altering operational, security, and financial risk profiles.

Such changes illustrate hindrances on market growth, such as skepticism due to concerns over security and the desire to own a solution; a lack of benchmarks to define cloud performance; and resistance from vendors to an operation expenditure business model and the proactive positioning of cloud-based solutions.

Daher expects cloud-based medical imaging informatics to serve as an asset in the transition toward a value-based health care system.

“I think they’re going hand-in-hand in the sense that there’s realization that informatics are a huge enabler, if not a cornerstone, to allow the transformation to value-based care,” he said. “It gets some pressure off IT departments for some things that can be outsourced to vendors, so they will know their internal organization best. These IT departments can focus on more value-adding and be more a part of the value initiative internally by using cloud-based solutions.”

The analysis is titled Growth Opportunities in the Global Cloud-based Medical Imaging Informatics Market and part of Frost & Sullivan's Transformational Health — Digital Health Growth Partnership Service program.

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