Pandemic: Health IT Goes Viral

Spending on health IT systems at the state and local level will surge almost 20 percent over the next five years, a trickle compared to the 20 percent annual growth rate forecast for the health care IT market in China.

The market research firm INPUT projects that the domestic health IT market will grow from $8.3 billion in 2010 to $9.9 billion in 2015, reports Healthcare IT News. Much of the increase will come from the adoption of electronic health records, as hospitals and providers move quickly to take advantage of federal incentive funds, worth billions of dollars, to offset implementation costs.

"States, localities and regional extension centers are going to move quickly to capitalize on EHR funding," said Kristina Mulholland, an INPUT senior analyst quoted by Healthcare IT News.

The market in China is smaller (for now) but is growing more quickly, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that China's health care IT market will reach $2.4 billion by 2013 and continue to expand at an annual rate of 19.9 percent annually. China's Ministry of Health is spending $124 billion over three years to reform its health care system.

The country's "health care IT market will see remarkable growth in the next five years," wrote the Journal, quoting Janet Chiew, an analyst for the research firm IDC, which quantified the projected growth of health IT in China.

Among the companies seeking to exploit China's fast-growing health IT sector is IBM, which is standardizing patient records with an eye toward analyzing the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine.

The ultimate goal, according to the Journal article, is "to help doctors identify treatment plans combining Western and traditional Chinese medicine from statistics drawn from patient records."