HBS TekPlus believes that the major drivers in the hospital information systems market include:

Politicians and Hospitals Being Forced to Change Policies and Become Accountable for Healthcare Quality Hospitals Beginning to Understand the Concept of Return on Investment HIS becoming part of a Wider Healthcare IT Integration Despite the exciting prospects for growth there are many challenges for the healthcare IT market to overcome in order to ensure growth of HIS is prolonged and sustained. Dr. Bhatti, lead consultant of the report states, 'the deployment of HIS solutions is moving towards a more integrated healthcare information system where hospitals play a crucial role.' However to move to an integrated solution European governments will need to stimulate not only investment in IT infrastructure and software but also reassess the provision of healthcare services within their countries. 'Deploying an integrated IT infrastructure that encompasses hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, practitioners and other facets for the provision of healthcare, is the long-term objective of the industry,' Dr. Bhatti continues.

The shape of the industry segmentation will change from vertically deployed IT infrastructure, for financial and patient data requirements within hospitals to also seek to include and encompass all aspects of healthcare provision and support. Gareth Williams, managing consultant on the report adds, 'demand has moved away from proprietary hospital information systems to Windows based technology and this has aided and stimulated the deployment of IT infrastructure.' The next move for the healthcare market will be to use a common Web-based platform upon which many different healthcare IT modules can fit into and interoperate. Moving to a Web-based platform and doing away with the unnecessary IT migration experienced by other vertical markets will enable healthcare providers to make longer-term IT cost savings.

There are many barriers to entry for the deployment of IT infrastructure since healthcare providers have traditionally spent very little on IT, far less than that per employee in the financial vertical and surprisingly even less than in education and government. Gareth Williams continues, 'since there is little capital available for the deployment of IT in hospitals and the healthcare market at large, IT software vendors need to innovate their sales and marketing strategy and begin to share some of the risk with their potential customers.' In order to stimulate sales in this market vendors need to sell solutions that bring them residual revenues based on the performance of the IT infrastructure deployed. Hospitals remain somewhat sceptical as to benefits that IT can deliver and these perspectives will also need changing. However as hospitals are forced to act and behave more like businesses and hospital managers gain the title of CEO the importance of IT will become more applicable to meet their requirements.

Figure 1.2 Future HIS Market Segmentation, >2002