Forrester ranks top 10 cloud vendors for healthcare
Salesforce, Kinvey, IBM, CloudMine and Microsoft provide the strongest enterprise cloud systems for healthcare organizations, according to a Q3 2017 analysis from Forrester Research.
Forrester assessed 10 vendors: ClearDATA, CloudMine, IBM, Kinvey, Medable, Microsoft, MphRx, NTT DATA, Salesforce and SAS. Forrester picked these vendors, the research firm said, because each of them easily integrate with major electronic health records vendors, allow enterprises to develop a 360-degree view of their patients, provide advanced analytics capabilities including patient analytics, include software development kits and application programming interfaces, provide data governance and access management, and meet HIPAA standards for handling protected health information.
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The research firm used 37 criteria to evaluate the enterprise health cloud vendors, researching, analyzing and scoring each company. After examining existing research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, the firm developed the set of 37 evaluation criteria, grouped into three high-level areas: current offering, strategy and market presence.
Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which Salesforce, Kinvey, IBM, CloudMine and Microsoft lead the pack. Medable, ClearDATA and SAS offer competitive options. NTT DATA and MphRx lag behind.
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When it comes to the top three, Forrester wrote that Salesforce’s strengths include bringing together non-clinical and clinical data and pre-built analytics functionality. Kinvey earned its rankings for partnerships that enable integration with EHRs and Internet of Things devices. IBM, likewise, integrates with a wide range of EHRs as well as lab and practice management systems, Forrester said, adding that proprietary patient matching algorithms as well as analytics and cognitive capabilities helped it in the rankings.
“The enterprise health cloud market is growing in large part due to healthcare CIOs increasingly realizing that digital transformation is necessary to advance efforts to better engage patients,” Forrester Research said.
Cloud-based data insights and digital experience creation will dictate which healthcare firms will thrive, Forrester added.
Vendors that can integrate outdated systems of record, provide cognitive capabilities, and offer access to robust developer communities position themselves to successfully deliver true digital transformation to their healthcare customers, the firm said.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
