By Jennifer Bresnick

August 30, 2018 - The market for healthcare artificial intelligence tools is expected to surpass $34 billion by the middle of the 2020s, driven largely by a growing desire to automate tasks and harness deeper insights into clinical and financial issues, says a new report by Tractica.

“It is no secret that healthcare is expensive,” says principal analyst Keith Kirkpatrick. “Cost reduction is a major driver of many healthcare initiatives and incorporating AI technology is no exception.”

“AI applications are designed to address specific, real-world use cases that make the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of patients more efficient, accurate, and available to populations around the world.”

The global market will rise to the challenge of synthesizing massive volumes of big data though machine learning techniques, including deep learning, semantic computing, and neural networks, according to the report.

Key clinical and operational areas will include medical imaging analytics, drug discovery and clinical trials, clinical decision support, natural language processing, biomarker discovery, and patient management.

Software developers seeking to address these use cases are likely to see $8.6 billion in annual revenue by 2025, contributing to the $34 billion total in software sales, hardware installations, and consulting opportunities within the AI market.

Despite the impressive total market value, artificial intelligence tools only make up a fraction of the overall healthcare IT opportunity, according to a separate report by Meticulous Research.

The global health IT market is predicted to be worth a staggering $223.16 billion by 2023, driven only in part by AI and machine learning.

The majority of the marketplace, which will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.7 percent, will be focused on meeting regulatory requirements and developing strategies to cut costs.

Health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability solutions will be in high demand, as will supply chain management, workforce management, fraud detection, and consumer relationship management tools.

These systems will combine to streamline administrative tasks that are currently completed manually, and may help organizations proactively identify opportunities for improvement that tend to be hidden within the sheer complexity of big data sets.

Cloud-based solutions accounted for the largest segment of the software and service market in 2017, and are likely to continue to grow in popularity as organizations seek speedy, low-cost options for deploying and maintaining health IT systems.

A number of well-known technology vendors, including those primarily viewed as electronic health record (EHR) providers, will lead the market through the middle of the next decade, Meticulous Research says.

Epic Systems, Cerner Corporation, McKesson, Allscripts, GE, and athenahealth will continue to post strong results across the international health IT market.

Additional names that are likely to remain at the top of the executive wish list for infrastructure, analytics, and other health IT needs include Optum, Oracle, Infor, Dell, Philips, and Cognizant Technology Solutions.

Complementing the analytics ecosystem is the growing Internet of Things (IoT), which includes medical devices, consumer-grade wearable devices, and innovative sensors embedded in a variety of tools and objects.

The IoT generates vast quantities of data that are subsequently analyzed by health IT systems, and IoT devices are quickly becoming integral to population health management strategies and predictive analytics models.

MarketsandMarkets anticipates that the healthcare IoT market will be worth $158.07 billion by 2022, representing a 30.8 percent CAGR.

Artificial intelligence technologies will contribute significantly to the growth of the IoT sector, as will systems designed to enhance security around applications, devices, and networks.

The report notes that telemedicine and remote patient monitoring devices and software comprised the largest segment of the IoT market in 2017, and will continue to exhibit strong growth over the next four to five years.

Clinical research organizations are also likely to contribute significantly to the expansion of the IoT market as they seek to collect more data on patients both inside and outside the clinical setting.

Several of the notable names in the Internet of Things sector overlap with leaders in other analytics markets, including Philips and GE.

Medtronic, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems, Qualcomm Life, SAP, Stanley Healthcare, and Honeywell Life Solutions are also cited as vendors with an edge over the competition.

Healthcare organizations expect that artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and other analytics solutions will produce actionable insights, reduced costs, and quicker response times to regulatory changes.

The rapid growth of these interrelated market segments indicates optimism in the continuing maturity of big data analytics and AI as vendors and developers architect new strategies to generate actionable insights across the care continuum.