Big Data Spending at Health-Centric Agencies

Deltek’s recent report, Federal Priorities Spotlight: Big Data, 2018-2023, reveals a $3B market in big data goods and services in the federal government from FY 2015- 2017. Naturally, big data has a large presence in the healthcare market. Data is collected from dozens of sources including electronic health records, research, medical devices and wearables. Not only is the data heavily used in medical research, federal health care agencies also apply big data practices in areas of medical monitoring, administrative operations, and in waste, fraud and abuse. Looking at the some of the federal government’s health agencies such as DHA, VA and HHS as a sampling, big data spending for all three health-centered agencies from FY 2015 to FY 2017 totaled $602M, about 20% of the overall big data market.

Breaking that down further, each agency is seen to continually grow year-after-year in annual spend for big data software, hardware and services:

Source: FPDS, Deltek

Note: the above figures are a based on FPDS reported spending. Deltek has refined the spending using specific big data keywords.

The above chart denotes that while each of the agencies see continued increases in the three year time frame, the largest jumps in big data spending at DHA, VA and HHS primarily occur in the FY 2016 to FY 2017 time period. The increases at HHS from FY 2015 to FY 2017 are chiefly due to further investments in analytics (+$34M), data management (+$6M) and health analytics (+$5M). Under the VA, the 42% increase in spend from FY 2016 to FY 2017 is largely due to additional obligations under data warehouse support (+$8M), machine data analytics (+$4M) and security analytics (+10M). At the DHA, the additional $11M from FY 2015 to FY 2017 is mostly due to further spend in metadata (+$4M) and machine data analytics (+$2M).

The additional investments under each agency share the same conclusion: big data services are being heavily sought after in the federal healthcare space.

In fact, the sum of big data services for all three agencies from FY 2015 to FY 2017 totals $416M, approximately 70% of the total big data market for DHA, VA and HHS in this time period.

Source: FPDS, Deltek

The top type of big data services under HHS by total include: analysis support ($143M), data warehouse support ($74M), unspecified analytics ($37M) and financial analytics ($30M). Under VA, the top services are: analysis support ($19M), data warehouse support ($14M), security analytics ($11M) and unspecified analytics ($11M). For the DHA, top services consist of analysis support ($17M), unspecified analytics ($6M) and metadata ($6M).

For more spending trends in the federal big data market, primary investments in these agencies and more, please refer to Deltek’s recent report.