According to new research from MarketsandMarkets, the global healthcare cloud computing market will be worth $5.4 billion by 2017. The report which studied the cloud computing market over the five year period from 2012 to 2017, found that in healthcare it will grow at an annual compounded rate of 20.5 percent in that time period.

The global cloud computing market revenue is expected to increase from $1.77 billion in 2011 to $5.4 billion by 2017. The report says that North America will be the largest contributor to this market as a result of various changes such as the conversion from ICD-09 to ICD-10 clinical diagnosis codes and meaningful use rules of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which mandate the adoption of electronic medical records.

The authors of the report break cloud technology in healthcare market into applications, deployment models, service models, pricing models, and components. Applications in healthcare are of two main types, the report says, Clinical Information Systems (CIS) and Non Clinical Information Systems (NCIS). CIS includes EMR, CPOE, PACS, RIS, LIS, PIS, and others while NCIS includes revenue cycle management, Automatic Patient Billing, cost accounting, payroll management, and claims management.

The healthcare industry has been slow to adopt public clouds due to its highly regulated nature whereas the private and hybrid cloud models have a higher affinity, the report’s authors say. The healthcare cloud market by service models is further classified into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The market is dominated by SaaS providers such as Carestream Health, Inc. and GE Healthcare (U.K.).

Cloud computing is a utility based or pay-per-use type of a service and the market can be categorized by two types of pricing models offered by the service vendors, the pay-as-you-go model and the subscription-based or spot pricing model. The fifth segmentation of the market is by its components namely, software, hardware, and services.

According the report, healthcare organizations are expected to deliver more while limiting healthcare costs at the same time. Despite this a few factors restrain the growth of this market with security and privacy concerns being the primary reasons for slow adoption of this technology.