Asia Pacific (APAC) is the fastest growing healthcare information technology (healthcare IT) market across the world, said Frost & Sullivan.
Within APAC, after Japan, Australia is the second largest market for health technology adoption.
Public hospitals are the highest spenders on healthcare HIT solutions, but Australia’s many smaller hospitals in rural and remote areas hardly spend anything in health IT.
The report said fragmentation in the healthcare system does not allow the information that has been collected to be managed, shared and used effectively. This fragmentation in the hospital infrastructure prevents a really robust development of health IT across the country.
Australia is a growing market for cloud solutions and services, and digital hospitals will be the mainstay of Australia’s future hospitals.
Pharma and medical device companies are also moving toward data driven models and leveraging IT for business model transformation. All this will create the marketplace for health data.
Frost & Sullivan said technology trends for healthcare in Australia in 2015 would be the digitalisation, decentralisation and democratisation of healthcare.
“Health IT penetration in the country is expected to continue to rise, but mainly in the form of facility upgrades and hi-tech adoption across existing hospitals. Dependable and reliable health data sharing is still a distant dream for Australia, although concerted efforts in this direction have begun,” said Natasha Gulati, industry manager, Connected Health, Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan.
