Healthcare consulting market expected to grow to $41.2 billion by 2026
The global healthcare consulting services market is expected to grow by a CAGR of 11.5% from $23.9 billion to $41.2 billion by 2026, according to a recent forecast report from MarketsandMarkets.
Growth will be primarily driven by digitization in healthcare, adoption of analytics and cloud, rising disease burden worldwide, and increasing demand to reduce rising costs of healthcare. Factors working to limit growth in healthcare consulting spend include concerns around data confidentiality and the hidden costs of consulting services.
As Covid-19 continues to upturn healthcare, providers will continue to look for new, tech-enabled avenues of care delivery. Use cases like virtual health are expected to further drive demand for healthcare consulting services, according to the report.
In terms of offerings, strategy consulting is projected to account for the largest share of healthcare sector consulting spend in 2021, at 21.1%. These engagements focus on optimizing efficiency, improving revenue generation, bringing structural improvements, and generally improving the profit potential of organizations.
Healthcare providers are expected to be the fastest-growing client segment, eclipsing government agencies, health insurance payers, pharma and biotech firms, and medical devices firms. MarketsandMarkets projects healthcare providers will considerably grow consulting spend in the period to 2026, as Covid-19 has heavily increased patient volumes and prompted the need for scalable business models that can handle higher volumes of consumers.
The North American market will continue to dominate the global consulting market, with a 46.8% share in 2020 and the highest projected regional CAGR of 9.3% to 2026. MarketsandMarkets attributes this to a strong US economy that has enabled significant investments in new technologies, advanced IT infrastructure, and increased SaaS adoption. The US is also the only developed country without a single-payer healthcare system – massively increasing the overall cost of healthcare, which includes consulting spend.
The prominent players in the healthcare consulting market, according to the report, are Accenture, Cognizant, the Big Four accountancies, the Big Three strategy firms, and Huron Consulting Group.
MarketsandMarkets is a research firm based in Chicago with more than 850 people globally. The firm works with 80% of Fortune 1000 companies.