The $6B Health IT Market: Exploring Opportunities Beyond EHRs

by Chris Wiedemann, Senior Analyst

Health IT in the federal government represents a $6 billion market.

Let that number sink in. It may seem high, but recent guidance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) indicate that “health IT” as a concept means much more than just EHRs. According to the report, there are three broad categories of health IT:

• Administrative health IT functions: This includes billing and claims processing, practice and inventory management, and scheduling.
• Health management IT functions: This category includes health information and data exchange, data capture and encounter documentation, electronic access to clinical results, clinical decision support, knowledge management, and patient identification.
• Medical device health IT functions: Examples include computer aided detection/diagnostic software, radiation treatment planning, and robotic surgical planning and control software – in other words, devices actively used in medical treatments.

Put all that together, and you end up with huge slices of IT dollars coming out of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Defense Health Agency (DHA), and research-oriented divisions of HHS such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that are directly addressable to the health IT market. A wide range of COTS solutions, from data management and analytics to storage, workflow management, and case management, could potentially represent a part of the larger health IT picture.

So what does that mean for industry? In short, it represents a huge opportunity. Driving meaningful use of health IT is an administration priority, and federal agencies and departments that manage some aspect of healthcare (like those listed above) have a clear mandate to bulk up on their technological capabilities to better execute their missions. If you sell any solutions that fit into the categories above, and are not already talking to some of these customers, now is the right time to start.

To learn more about COTS sales opportunities in the federal health IT market, register for immixGroup’s upcoming Market Intelligence briefing: DHA & VA: Exploring Information Sharing & Interoperability Trends in Health IT.