By Jennifer Bresnick

December 11, 2018 - There appear to be rosy days ahead for investors and vendors with interests in offering some of the most talk-about technologies to healthcare organizations.

The market for products and services rooted in blockchain, deep learning, and other innovative ways to manage and analyze big data are slated to see significant growth, according to recent market reports.

Providers, payers, and other stakeholders appear very eager to invest in the tools, strategies, and systems that will help equip them to face numerous new challenges in the months and years ahead. Vendors and service providers will have unprecedented opportunities to compete for the attention of healthcare organizations looking to meet ambitious clinical and financial goals.

Healthcare will help drive $18 billion in spending on deep learning by 2024

Deep learning, one of the most promising branches of artificial intelligence, is predicted to see an impressive 42 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) until 2024, according to Market Research Engine.

By the middle of the decade, healthcare organizations will join their peers from other industries in spending $18 billion on deep learning technologies to analyze images, extract meaning from unstructured data, and support decision-making.

READ MORE: UX, AI, and Amazon: Top 5 Healthcare Predictions for 2019

Organizations will need to invest in hardware as well as software to support deep learning tools, the report notes, and companies that offer cutting-edge computing capabilities will likely benefit from the focus on infrastructure development.

Chipmakers with established reputations and a growing healthcare presence, such as NVIDIA, Intel, and Qualcomm Technologies, may be of particular interest to healthcare organizations looking to bulk up their AI processing power.

A separate report from Market Research Engine predicts that the demand for artificial intelligence chipsets will top $59 billion by the same year, representing a 36 percent CAGR throughout the forecast period.

Meanwhile, on the storage and analytics side, companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Google will likely attract attention as they roll out more deep learning and artificial intelligence options.

However, healthcare entities will need to overcome the challenges of data siloes and poor data quality if they are to make the most of what deep learning has to offer, the report adds.

Global healthcare big data analytics market to exceed $68 billion by mid-2020s

READ MORE: Blockchain Offers Promising Path to Better Provider Directory Data

Deep learning represents just a small portion of the overall big data analytics market, says Zion Market Research.

Globally, the big data analytics segment are expected to be worth more than $68.03 billion by 2024, driven largely by continued North American investments in electronic health records, practice management tools, and workforce management solutions.

This represents a CAGR of 19.72 percent above the 2017 valuation of $19.72 billion.

In order to meet their long-term goals, organizations will be investing heavily in data aggregation, analysis, modeling, quality improvement, validation, and reporting, the report states.

In 2016, organizations focused on financial analytics tools, but they are predicted to be moving on to developing competencies in clinical decision support, precision medicine, and population health management.

READ MORE: Big Data to See Explosive Growth, Challenging Healthcare Organizations

Stakeholders will also be bulking up on infrastructure to support their analytics initiatives: data storage, firewalls, routers, virtual private networks, and other critical foundational systems will continue to drive growth in the market segment.

The thirst for business intelligence will underpin $8.9 billion in global spending

Healthcare organizations eager to gain visibility into their financial and operational opportunities will spend nearly $9 billion on business intelligence tools by 2023, predicts Research and Markets.

“Growth in the healthcare business intelligence market is primarily driven by the implementation of government initiatives to increase EHR adoption, growing adoption of data-driven decision-making, growing pressure to curb healthcare spending and improve patient outcomes, big data in healthcare, and the increasing number of patient registries,” says the report.

Once again, North America is expected to account for the majority of that investment, with 62 percent of the potential market – and a 16.2 percent CAGR – attributable to North American spending.

The market is highly competitive, the report notes, with companies such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Tableau, Information Builders, Sisense, and Microsoft vying for business in the healthcare industry.

While these vendors are likely to offer a slew of new and upgraded products to meet the high demand, the significant upfront investments required to get a business intelligence initiative off the ground may constrain some of the sector’s anticipated growth.

Vendors will need to create attractive pricing frameworks and unique product offerings to secure market share in this segment of the analytics industry.

A staggering 70 percent CAGR is in store for healthcare blockchain technologies

The interest in blockchain technologies for healthcare is expected to explode over the next six years, according to Zion Market Research.

In 2017, the global healthcare blockchain market sat at $34.47 million.

However, the segment is predicted to see a 70.45 percent CAGR until 2024, resulting in a $1.4 billion opportunity for blockchain vendors.

The distributed ledger technology is just starting to catch on with healthcare providers and payers looking for more secure, trustworthy ways to manage and exchange sensitive data.

But if high-profile entities such as IBM, PokitDok, Hashed Health, and Patientory have anything to say about it, blockchain will meet the expectations set by the report within the anticipated time frame.

“Supply chain management segment holds the maximum share of the application segment,” observes Zion Market Research. “Based on the end user, blockchain technology in healthcare market has been segmented into healthcare payers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers.”

Other key use cases include medical research, interoperability, claims management, and billing.

Blockchain may be particularly powerful in combination with some of the other analytics and artificial intelligence strategies finding a home in healthcare. Using blockchain to liberate and share key data sets used for business intelligence and clinical analytics could support a more fluid big data ecosystem.

Healthcare organizations will need to develop comprehensive big data roadmaps to ensure they are investing in a seamless suite of technologies that will support their goals.

As the markets for these technologies expand, and vendors continue to offer innovative tools and technologies, healthcare stakeholders will likely be in a good position to implement the infrastructure and applications required to succeed with their data-driven initiatives.