CIOs hope healthcare IT spending to increase in 2017 year

Healthcare CIOs are more likely to grow healthcare IT spending over the next twelve months in contrast to top IT executives in other industries, as providers seek to make better the efficiency and business procedures. That’s why CIOs expect healthcare IT spending to increase in the year of 2017.

Healthcare IT executives also claim that they hope to sustain to struggle with important shortages in staff with required technology skills, in accordance to outcomes of a new survey from Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey.

The survey of 190 healthcare CIOs indicates that 52% expect increases in Healthcare IT spending budgets over the next year, while 35% assume unchanged budgets. By contrast, 45% of CIOs from entire industries say they hope budgets to increase, while 33% of them anticipate budgets to remain unchanged.

 “The Healthcare industry IT spend has been significantly low, but latest high profile security breaches, uncertainties over regulatory compliance, growing complexity of health IT systems and the deployment of digital and mobild healTh services to make better the patient access, satisfaction and brand loyalty have elevated the priority and spend in the board room for longer term investments,” summarizes a report on the survey’s findings.

Nevertheless, however 80% of CIOs show that there is an increasing strategic role for IT in their agencies, in contrast with 67% from all industries, only half of those surveyed claimed that they have a clear digital business vision and strategy, while the survey discovered that 39% of respondents were presently working on a digital business strategy.

In fact, healthcare agencies are less likely to have a digital business strategy, within business units or enterprise wide, than the all-industries average.

“Despite important increases in Healthcare IT spending in recent years, the maturity of IT contribution or investment in healthcare is yet lagging in comparison with other industries, and healthcare companies know they require catching up,” analyzed Vince Vickers, an advisory principal for healthcare and life sciences at KPMG.

“Healthcare agencies have primary operational cost pressures now more than ever, and there is a chance to close that gap rapidly with disruptive technologies and analytic devices that open the door to the notion of the ‘creative CIO,” he states.

Although, as Vickers points out, the survey discloses that healthcare lags other industries in vital technology skills. When inquired in what areas their agencies are suffering from skills shortages, 45% of healthcare CIOs said big data/analytics, 36% reacted to project management, 30% indicated change management, and 29% said security/resilience.

One sector that is gaining interest from healthcare agencies as a “means to leapfrog to more contemporary technology” is cloud computing, in accordance to Vickers. “No industry has a greater chance than healthcare to leverage the cloud to change its operations, decrease cost and make better its customer satisfaction (patient care) than healthcare,” he stated.

The top 3 reasons CIOs provided for utilizing the cloud were to make better the availability and resiliency (45%), to use the best solution available (35%) and to make better the agility and responsiveness (34%).

Still, at the similar time, those surveyed showed that the top 3 issues to adopting cloud computing were data loss and privacy risks (55%), integration with existing architecture (46%), and legal and regulatory compliance problems (42%). In specific, Vickers pointed out that one of the issues facing healthcare agencies is that few clinical software and electronic health record (EHR) systems are yet not available or optimized for the cloud.