The US healthcare industry will spend over US$100 billion between 2012 and 2017 on telecoms services and equipment including mobile technology, according to a recently published report by the Insight Research Corporation.

Among the findings of the report are the unsurprising conclusion that telecommunications enables healthcare to expand its capacity by reaching a geographically dispersed audience. In addition the report points to “pervasive wireless and broadband access” acting as a boost to patient monitoring.

The report also points to a growth in data storage requirements in the healthcare industry as more use is made of digital recordings increases across treatment systems. Healthcare providers will increasingly need their suppliers to pull together internal systems as well as link with other providers and to build cloud-based data centres as part of the same requirement.

Other trends include digitized healthcare fostering greater collaboration among healthcare provides as well as macro trends such as patients in the US spending even more on heatlhcarer in the future and the trend in the country towards an aging population.

As part of the headline figure mentioned above, the report projects that healthcare spend on telecoms service will grow from US$9.1 billion in 2012 to US$14.4 billion in 2017. Currently this spend is weighted towards fixed services rather than wireless but the split will shift to a more even one by 2017, indicates the report.