Unified Communications as a Service in Healthcare Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2023 - 2028)

The unified communications-as-a-service market is expected to register a CAGR of 18.3% during the forecast period. The healthcare industry requires professionals to respond quickly to attend to the patient. UcaaS provides this opportunity to streamline communication processes and improve the quality of patient care.

Key Highlights

• The advent of cost-effective cloud-based solutions has seen increased adoption from healthcare providers, often categorized as having minimum IT budgets. With the subscription-based United Communication services in place, the healthcare contact centers are establishing their PBX systems and seamlessly addressing multiple customer requests from multiple sites. ​
• With UCaaS solutions, like cloud-based telephony, messaging, and video-conferencing, caregivers can access essential data in real time. Governments across regions, such as South Korea, are also testing telemedicine to provide affordable remote patient care, thus, giving scope for UCaaS companies.
• UCaaS, coupled with organizational mobility, provides numerous advantages, like real-time communications to locate and connect the caregivers instantly, effective call routing, and faster connections regardless of location (possible through feature-rich smartphones), and also enables the healthcare organization to establish rules and reduce interruptions and distractions from ER rooms to surgeries.
• Due to its simplicity, the old UC system is preferred by most enterprises. Large organizations are hesitant to employ UCC services since it is difficult for them to distinguish between standard hosted and managed UCC platforms. The move from traditional PBX communication to UCC will necessitate a faster adoption of the capabilities by the entire workforce to utilize the features thoroughly. As a result, pressure is placed on a company's IT department, which may disrupt the timeframe.
• UCaaS platforms enable healthcare businesses to keep internal and external communications running during the COVID-19 pandemic by keeping workers connected by phone, setting up virtual team meetings through video conferencing and online doctor consultancy, and setting up cloud-based platforms that enable contact centers to keep up with customer service even when in-hospital work is being completed. ​Post-pandemic, the market is growing rapidly with the digital transformation of the healthcare sector.

Unified Communications as a Service in Healthcare Market Trends

Emergence of UCaaS in Healthcare Sector Drives the Market Growth

• UCaaS in healthcare is a delivery model wherein various communication and collaboration services and applications are outsourced to a third-party provider and delivered over a network across the healthcare sector. UCaaS technologies include presence technology, video conferencing, enterprise messaging, and telephony.
• Furthermore, the advent of cost-effective cloud-based solutions has seen increased adoption from healthcare providers, often categorized as having minimum IT budgets. With the subscription-based United Communication services in place, healthcare contact centers are establishing their PBX systems and seamlessly addressing multiple customer requests from multiple sites. ​
• The need for high-quality healthcare services has become paramount, especially considering the pandemic. Moreover, there have been several technological advancements in this sector, especially in prognostic and diagnostic services; however, there is still room for improvement.
• The increasing deployment of artificial intelligence has greatly aided organizations in catering to the digital transformation goal. AI-powered tools have allowed organizations to intuitively record calls, facilitate effortless transcriptions, and intelligently track speakers to understand users' needs and offer relevant services.
• Healthcare organizations are optimistic about BYOD since it facilitates improved workflow, cost savings, and compliance with healthcare legislation provisions, such as the US Affordable Care Act. Healthcare players are showing confidence in adopting BYOD across the healthcare sector. According to Philips 2022 poll, 57% of healthcare professionals classified as early adopters of digital health technologies and predictive analytics reported having measures to address health disparities, compared to 21% of the global average.

North America is Expected to Register the Largest Market

• Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) in the cloud is a digital transformation for reinforcing commercial tasks. UCaaS in healthcare is a conveyance methodology in which many partnerships, communication applications, and administrations are moved to an outsider supplier and conveyed across a network in the healthcare industry.
• The cloud adoption in the sector, which includes moving EHR systems and other enterprise applications, which traditionally ran on client-server architectures, also provides scope for UC companies offering their services over the cloud on a subscription basis across the region.
• As a result of the rise of 5G and edge networking, vendors could expect exciting changes in the real-time communication market in the North American region. UCaaS provides a place for endless creative services and a collection of managed services tools that may help suppliers maximize revenue generation in the near years due to improved security, simpler provisioning, and a set of managed services tools.
• In addition, UCaaS, coupled with organizational mobility, provides several advantages, like real-time communications to instantly locate and connect caregivers, faster connections, and effective call routing, regardless of location, enabling healthcare organizations to establish rules and reduce distractions from ER rooms to surgeries.

Unified Communications as a Service in Healthcare Industry Overview

The unified communications-as-a-service market is highly fragmented, with significant players like Ring Central Inc., 8X8 Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and Comcast Corporation Vonage Holdings Inc.(Ericsson). However, with the advancement in UCaaS technologies across the healthcare sector, new players are increasing their market presence and expanding their business footprint across emerging economies. Players in the market are adopting strategies such as partnerships, mergers, innovations, and acquisitions to enhance their solutions offerings and gain sustainable competitive advantage.

• November 2022: Healius Ltd (Healius), one of Australia's leading healthcare corporations, selected RingCentral Inc. to deliver an integrated UCaaS and contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution. This technological investment is intended to improve the doctor and patient experience in Healius' pathology and diagnostic imaging practices by enhancing communications, first in the fundamental domain of speech and then adding other communication channels in the long run. The information and insights given by the RingCentral platform are also intended to increase workforce and operational efficiency.
• July 2022: Ericsson completed its acquisition of Vonage Holdings Inc. (Vonage), contributing to Ericsson's goal of using technological leadership to build its mobile network business and expand into the enterprise. Ericsson now has access to strong building blocks allowing it to offer a comprehensive range of communications solutions, including Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), UCaaS, and CCaaS.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support

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