[August 14, 2014]

IDC Health Insights Evaluates Cloud Adoption Trends in Chinese Health Industry

IDC Health Insights today announced a new report, Cloud Adoption Trends in Chinese Health Industry (Doc #CN243835), the latest in an ongoing series designed to evaluate the China Healthcare IT Market Opportunities. Developed by a cross-regional team of IDC (News - Alert) Health Insights analysts, the study provides a reference for Chinese healthcare providers adopting cloud technology and offers guidance to cloud technology vendors who wish to expand their market share with healthcare providers in China.

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"The latest report in our IDC Health Insights China Healthcare IT Market Opportunities series provides an industry benchmark for Chinese healthcare providers and cloud technology vendors looking to gain an accurate and timely pulse on current cloud adoption," said Scott Lundstrom, Group Vice President, IDC Health Insights. "By collaborating with our colleagues around the globe, this new series offers a comprehensive perspective on the evolving healthcare industry in China, the second largest healthcare economy after the United States, and underscores our ongoing commitment to measuring the impact of global IT trends on the healthcare industry today."

Cloud computing technology has been making inroads in several industry verticals in China, especially in banking, telecommunications, and government. While healthcare cloud adoption is in the early stages of deployment, as the Chinese healthcare industry takes steps towards acieving its goal of healthcare reform, cloud services will play an important role.

Key findings in the new report include:

• The top 3 drivers of cloud services deployment, according to an IDC Health Insights survey of Chinese healthcare IT executives, are to reduce IT costs, deploy more standard (less customized) IT systems, and deploy them faster and easier.
• The three areas where cloud technology pilots and implementations are taking place in the healthcare industry are: Large 3A hospitals, Regional Health Information Systems (RHIS), and in personal wellness and health management initiatives.
• The RHIS - with the need to collaborate and exchange data across a number of healthcare organizations, including small community health service centers and township health service centers - will benefit most from cloud technologies.

A lack of standards, especially around privacy and security, inhibits greater adoption of cloud services. Although the China Healthcare IT Association is in the process of evaluating standards for cloud deployment, healthcare IT executives are challenged by a lack of guidance for their cloud deployment plans, especially when it comes to security, and service level agreements (SLAs). "Cloud technology is being adopted by large hospitals in China. The areas that are seeing early adopters are server, storage, and desktop virtualization. In the future, cloud technologies are predicted to be widely adopted by hospitals along with at the RHIS and PHIS level. China is ripe for adoption of the 'community cloud' model given the government's long-term plans for cross-organization collaboration across the care continuum," said Leon Xiao, Senior Research Manager at IDC Health Insights.

Currently all hospitals in China have their own datacenters that are managed by internal IT staff whose workload is heavy. According to IDC Health Insights, in the future, hospitals will shift to cloud computing without the need to deploy and maintain individual datacenters and IT staff can focus on procurement and service level agreements (SLAs). Hospitals run by foreign investors will drive cloud adoption in China. Simultaneously establishing RHISs is a key goal of China health reform and RHISs will widely adopt cloud technology for running health services across the different provider organizations. On the consumer front, IDC Health Insights asserts wearable devices development will increase the demand for allied cloud services in the world's largest consumer market.

For additional information about this report or to arrange a one-on-one briefing with Judy Hanover, Sash Mukherjee, or Leon Xiao, please contact Sarah Murray at 781-378-2674 or [email protected]. Reports are available to qualified members of the media. For information on purchasing reports, contact [email protected]; reporters should email [email protected]

About IDC Health Insights

IDC Health Insights assists health businesses and IT leaders, as well as the suppliers who serve them, in making more effective technology decisions by providing accurate, timely, and insightful fact-based research and consulting services. Staffed by senior analysts with decades of industry experience, our global research analyzes and advises on business and technology issues facing the payer, provider and life sciences industries. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology market. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology, media, research, and events company. For more information, please visit www.idc-hi.com, email [email protected], or call 508-935-4445. Visit the IDC Health Insights Community at http://idc-community.com/health.

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