The European market in hospital administration systems will be worth £1.2bn by 2010, according to research undertaken by consulting company Frost & Sullivan, as hospitals across the continent realise they must lay the foundations for electronic health records, PACS and other e-health systems.
The reason for the growth in the sector is that hospitals are realising they must take time installing administrative applications before going ahead with e-health software that directly improves quality of care.
"Hospitals and vendors alike are beginning to recognise the actual business benefits that the sum of the functions of modern administrative and clinical systems can bring to healthcare organisations," said Kostantinos Nikolopoulos, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan.
"With administrative systems increasingly incorporating advanced capabilities and offering greater functionality, administrative software vendors can look forward to a whole new range of opportunities."
Last year, the European market was worth £776m, and Frost & Sullivan say that it is likely to grow steadily by a total of 7.5% in the next four years.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s research paper, ‘The European Hospital Administrative Systems Market’, while there is a lot of potential for software suppliers in the industry, increasingly complicated billing and government regulation can cause problems, particularly in the case of software developed in the US, which tends to be less patient-focused.
One particular example cited by the report is the German ‘diagnosis-related group’ billing method, which is causing older hospital administration systems to become deprecated.
Furthermore, the trend is for increasing integration of administrative and clinical systems. This brings another challenge to software companies as issues related to the order in which software is deployed; yet seamless integration is "critically important".
"By investing in software development and placing more emphasis on improving integration with clinical systems, administrative systems vendors can improve their market position against the competition," said Nikolopoulos.
Frost & Sullivan recommend one way of carrying this out would be to use modular platforms that contain discrete clinical and administrative elements which function in the same software. "Vendors need to adapt their research and development strategies in order to offer a competitive product."
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