Introduction

The healthcare industry is witnessing unprecedented churn and transformation, leading to a surge in adoption of IT and business process outsourcing. Driven by regulatory reforms, tenets of consumerization, market consolidation, and emergence of next-generation digital avenues, acceptance of outsourcing has accelerated in the space. The life sciences industry has been plagued with multi-faceted challenges such as stifling R&D efficiency, changing portfolio mix, and increasing M&A/restructuring. To tackle these, market participants are adopting real-world, evidence-based personalized medicine and outcomes-based methods, which call for increased implementation of analytics and infrastructure outsourcing tenets. As drug approvals dip again and competitive intensity rises, the manner in which firms adopt technology initiatives will be a key differentiator in determining their success in the marketplace.

Analytics has emerged as the key lever to ramp up operational efficiency, pervading the life sciences value chain and demonstrating business value by providing real-time actionable insights. Service providers across the spectrum have beefed up their capabilities to cater to this growing market. With companies stepping up adoption of outsourced delivery, there is an uptick in demand for relevant research and market intelligence on demand and supply trends in healthcare outsourcing across each subvertical – payer, provider, and life sciences. The need is more pronounced for the vertical-specific IT outsourcing function, where business challenges are driving greater adoption.

In this annual report, we analyze the current trends and future outlook of large, multi-year ITO relationships in the life sciences market. The report also provides specific insights into the need for value-chain-driven IT adoption.

SCOPE OF THE ANALYSIS

This report is structured across four key sections, each containing insights on the life sciences ITO market, with a focus on large-sized contracts:

• Healthcare IT outsourcing market overview: Analysis of the overall healthcare outsourcing market and transaction trends:
• Market size and growth
• Transaction trends for IT outsourcing in healthcare
• Segment-level analysis of healthcare outsourcing transactions, including:
• Business segments: healthcare payer, provider, and life sciences
• Function segments: AO and Infrastructure Outsourcing (IO)
• Geographic segments
• Life sciences ITO market overview: Analysis specific to the life sciences ITO segment with a focus on large transactions:
• Transactions activity and growth trends
• Demand characteristics for life sciences ITO services by geography, ITO subfunctions, buyer type, and buyer size
• Delivery trends for life sciences ITO services, including offshore leverage and global delivery locations
• Renewal opportunity till 2020
• A prescription for insight: focus analytics in the life sciences industry
• Introduction to analytics
• Application of analytics in the life sciences industry
• Life sciences firms’ big data and analytics strategy and initiatives
• Analytics’ service provider landscape
• Outlook for 2014-2015: Analysis of the outlook and implications for ITO for the coming year
• Outlook for overall healthcare IT outsourcing
• Outlook for life sciences IT outsourcing