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E-health reaches the cloud with solutions, which provide a large range of services for a wide variety of companies and institutions active in the health sector. From early offers, targeting specific patient segments — elderly, disabled or patients with chronic illnesses — innovative e-health in the cloud targets any interaction between patients and health service providers, institution-to-institution data exchange as well as communication between patients and/or health professionals.
The main players in the current e-health market are actually e-health service providers and several IT companies, but also telecom carriers, especially in the B2C environment. Services and solutions target typically healthcare providers — hospitals, clinics and physicians, clinical research organisations (CROs), the academe as well as patients.
Innovative e-health solutions are actually pushed by IT companies — for instance Dell, Oracle and Microsoft — and service providers — such as Athenahealth, Carestream and NextGen Healthcare — which typically offer cloud-based services as an integrated solution, including online access to EHRs (Electronic Health Records) and PACs (Picture archiving and communication system) as well as tools for documentation (e.g. speech-to-text documentation for physicians), diagnosis (e.g. analysis services) and post-discharge care (e.g. tele-monitoring, locating services). As a matter of fact, e-health service providers and IT companies are the ones who control most of the steps of the value-chain — the solution, its deployment, sometimes the hosting and managing of the solution itself — and therefore, also most of the revenue streams of the business model, which takes place largely within the B2B ecosystem. The only contact to patients relates to the download of the e-health application, for instance for a mobile device, and generates only a minimal one-time fee.
Telecom carriers, on the other hand, capitalise on their core business providing communication-based services such as hotline services, reminders and tele-monitoring, mostly offered as standalone. While telcos also offer B2B solutions, most carriers focus on B2C (e.g. providing services to assist senior citizens and patients with chronic illnesses) with a device-centric strategy, that is, centred on the provision of a device and the related software for their e-health applications. Alerts, analysis and reminder services, for instance, are delivered through SMS to the user's mobile phone while emergency locating services are transmitted via GPS to the user's monitoring device.
About this extract: This extract in based on InfoCom recent release “E-health reaches the cloud”, an Innovations Spotlight assessing the e-health industry, its players, the different business models as well as the user’s target segments. If you are interested in this report, do not hesitate to get in contact with us. Talk to us. We listen.
About InfoCom
InfoCom (infocom-de.com) is a market research and consultancy company with over 20 years experience providing strategic analyses and planning assistance to stakeholders in the telecommunications, IT and multimedia industries. InfoCom’s independent and fact-based analyses highlight trends and opportunities, supporting decision makers to understand market dynamics in order to improve their competitive advantage.
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