European Providers Still Testing the Waters of Big Data, According to IDC Health Insights Survey

European Providers Still Testing the Waters of Big Data, According to IDC Health Insights Survey
European Providers Still Testing the Waters of Big Data, According to IDC Health Insights Survey

LONDON, July 28, 2014 — A new survey by IDC Health Insights shows that European healthcare providers are still uncertain about the benefits of investing in Big Data and analytics (BDA) technologies. The survey shows that 16% of non-hospital healthcare provider respondents plan to invest in BDA solutions in the next 24 months, compared with 6% of hospital respondents.

European healthcare providers are currently focusing their investments on more familiar tools, such as business intelligence and analytics (BI/A). Greater familiarity with these solutions and use cases has led to wider adoption and stronger investment plans, but with healthcare providers increasingly required to provide more insights into their clinical outcomes and the appropriateness of their services, the more traditional BI tools are no longer able to support healthcare providers' information insight needs.

The survey also highlights that BDA is strategic to support the evolution of healthcare services delivery and the adoption of integrated care models — the objectives of all healthcare system reforms across Europe. Healthcare providers seem to have only a limited understanding of the benefits that BDA can bring to the organization, with most providers focusing on the more immediate and compelling aspects of BDA, such as managing the increasing volume and variety of data, and overlooking aspects such as velocity and value. Big Data enables organizations to analyze business problems by considering all health processes and their interactions, analyzing a greater number of scenarios quicker and more cheaply. With the advent of changes in how care is delivered and financed, BDA will take on new importance, with survey results showing that healthcare organizations investing in BDA are looking at:

• Operational efficiencies to reduce costs, waste, and abuse of resources through more efficient methods for data integration, management, analysis, and service delivery.
• Business process improvements leading to an improved patient experience and finding new ways of delivering care while efficiently allocating services to enable sustainable management of the population's health.

"European healthcare providers need to investigate current best practices and start building the business case for a BDA proof of concept pilot, by identifying areas where the implications of operating without access to timely, relevant, and actionable information have a bigger impact on the organization's performance," said Silvia Piai, EMEA research manager, IDC Health Insights. "In order to ensure the success of the pilot and to future-proof their BDA investments, healthcare providers should pay particular attention to aligning incentives and ensuring cooperation between the IT department and line-of-business executives, merging BDA investments with the broader enterprise data management strategy, and leveraging the interdependencies with other 3rd Platform technologies."

For more information about the survey findings, please see the study Big Data and Analytics Trends in the European Healthcare Market: An IDC Health Insights Survey (IDC Health Insights #HIOH04W, July 2014). The survey interviewed 179 healthcare providers in the top 5 Western European countries (the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) on BDA adoption and investment plans; adoption drivers and barriers; and BDA's interdependencies with cloud, mobility, and social, and how it can ease pressure on the enterprise IT infrastructure for data acquisition and information processing and facilitate the delivery of information to support business decisions.

For more information or to arrange a one-on-one briefing with IDC Health Insights analysts, please contact Kanupriya at kanupriya@idc.com.