As the 2012 HIMSS conference steams ahead in Las Vegas this week, new data out from Compass Intelligence suggests the market for healthcare IT will reach $78B in 2012.

Looking ahead, the market is expected to maintain a 5% CAGR over the next five years to reach $92B by 2016, according to the research.  These numbers include expenditures on telecom services/equipment, IT personnel, mobile applications, computer hardware, network hardware, and third party services and outsourcing among other things.

Not surprisingly, the mHealth market is seen as one of the largest cost drivers, with growing acceptance and adoption of mobile health solutions driving the vendor community to launch a variety of innovative products and services designed around the goal of improving patient care across the board.

“One primary area of investment by the medical community include mobile solutions centered around remote monitoring and patient tracking,” says Stephanie Atkinson, Managing Partner at Compass Intelligence.  ”Implementation of the various stages of Electronic Health Records will drive infrastructure and integration needs to support the access, storage, and transfer of data across CRM, HIS, ERP, clinical, and other healthcare enterprise systems.”

The full report is available here.