While private, public and hybrid clouds are all deployment models that are available across the healthcare industry, that particular vertical has been slow to adopt public clouds due to its highly regulated nature. Private and hybrid cloud models have a higher affinity.
Cloud computing is a utility-based or pay-per-use type of a service and the market can be categorized by two types of pricing models offered by the service vendors, the pay-as-you-go model and the subscription-based or spot pricing model. According to MarketsandMarkets, the healthcare cloud market by service models is further classified into software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). And right now, the market is dominated by SaaS providers such as Carestream Health, Inc. and GE Healthcare (U.K.).
“The market is witnessing a surge in the adoption of technology and cloud computing is expected to bring about a revolution in the healthcare IT market,” the firm found. “Healthcare organizations are expected to deliver more while limiting healthcare costs at the same time. Despite this a few factors restrain the growth of this market with security and privacy concerns being the primary reasons for slow adoption of this technology.”
Cloud computing is nonetheless estimated to serve as a boon to the healthcare industry, and the market is witnessing an increased adoption of the technology. In 2011, the penetration of cloud in healthcare was approximately 4 percent. However, MarketsandMarkets said that a large number of healthcare organizations are allocating funds for migration to cloud computing in the next five years.
