Practice Management Market To Hit $17.6B Within Seven Years

A new research report has concluded that the global practice management systems market should hit $17.6 billion by 2024, fueled in part by the growth of value-adds like integration with other healthcare IT solutions.

The report, by London-based Grand View Research, includes a list of what it regards as key players in this industry. These include Henry Schein MicroMD, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions, athenahealth, MediTouch, GE Healthcare, Practice Fusion, Greenway Medical, McKesson Corp, Accumedic Computer Systems and NextGen Healthcare.

The report argues that as PM systems are integrated with external systems EMRs, CPOE and laboratory information systems, practice management tools will increase in popularity. It says that this is happening because the complexity of medical billing and payment has grown over the last several years.

This is particularly the case in North America, where fast economic development, plus the presence of advanced research centers, hospitals, universities and medical device manufacturers keep up the flow of new product development and commercialization, researchers suggest.

In addition, researchers concluded that while PM software has accounted for the larger share of the market a couple of years ago, that’s changing. They predict that the services side of the business should grow substantially as practices demand training, support and system upgrades.

The report also says that cloud-based delivery of PM technology should grow rapidly in coming years. As Grand View reminds us, most PM systems historically have been based on-premise, but the move to cloud-based solutions is the future. This trend took off in 2015, researchers said.

This report, while worthwhile, probably doesn’t tell the whole story. Along with growing demand for PM systems,I’d contend that vendor sales strategies are playing a role here. After all, integration of PM systems with EMRs is part of a successful effort by many vendors to capture this parallel market along with their initial sale.

This may or may not be good for providers. I don’t have any information on how the various integrated practice management systems compare, but my sense is that generally, they’re a bit underpowered compared with their standalone competitors.

Grand View doesn’t take a stand on the comparative benefits of these two models, but it does concede that emerging integrated practice management systems linking EMRs, e-prescribing, patient engagement and other software with billing are actually different than standalone systems, which focus solely on scheduling, billing and administration. That does leave room to consider the possibility that the two models aren’t equal.

Meanwhile, one thing the report doesn’t – and probably can’t – address is how these systems will evolve under value-based care in the US. While appointment scheduling and administration will probably be much the same, it’s not clear to me how billing will evolve in such models. But we’ll need to wait and see on that. The question of how PM systems will work under value-based care probably won’t be critically important for a few years yet.

(Side note:  You may want to check out John’s post from a few years ago on practice management systems trends. It seems that the industry goes back and forth as to whether independent PM systems serve groups better than integrated ones.)

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • I don’t think you’re right about PM systems that are integrated being not as good as their standalone competitors. I think this use to be the case, but now I think the integrated PMs get more attention than the standalone PMs. What is true is any transition to a new PM is hard. There’s something about the devil we know how to navigate. When you switch PM systems, you have to learn a new devil.

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