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Healthcare analytics market to exceed $10bn by 2017

If you've been wondering where the growth is in IT, one area is healthcare. Just one segment alone, healthcare analytics, is projected to grow past $10 billion by 2017.
Written by Denise Amrich, Contributor

With all the doom and gloom we've been reading about the PC market recently, many of you may be wondering where, exactly, the growth opportunities are in IT.

Well, wonder no more. The answer is healthcare IT. I've been talking about the growing need for electronic health records for quite some time now, and certainly EHR is a growth market.

But what can you do with all that information? How can we move from gathering information for more effective billing to gathering and processing information for more effective healthcare itself?

Assuming we get past the privacy issues (by anonymizing data appropriately), if we can gather and process enormous streams of health data, and if we can possibly do that in real time or even near-real time, we might have the opportunity to get ahead of disease vectors and outbreaks.

If you want to learn more about how big data works in real time, our own David Gewirtz did a webcast on the subject last week. Go ahead and watch Data go vroom! How to keep up with the volume, velocity, and variety of big data in real time. It's free and definitely worth a view.

But what about the opportunity for jobs and IT industry growth? Well, that's where it gets interesting. Industry analysis firm Markets and Markets recently published a report detailing the growth of healthcare analytics.

The bottom line is pretty amazing: The global healthcare analytics market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23.7 percent from 2012 to 2017. That puts just the analytics segment of the healthcare market at $10.8 billion within four years.

So, if I were you, I'd make sure I spent some time learning about big data, real-time analytics, and take a few statistics classes. Odds are, it will be worth it.

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