Much of what you read these days is negative. “The economic downturn”. “Slashing growth forecasts”. Shocking as it may be, there are companies doing well. Market researcher IDC has identified Software as a Service (SaaS) as a 40% growth sector.

What is SaaS? Simply it’s using the internet to host software applications. If you use Google, GMail, Hotmail, Salesforce, or NetSuite, you’ve used internet software. For healthcare, SaaS applications can help cut down on admin so healthcare workers can focus on, well, patient care. In fact, many healthcare organizations have moved to a paperless record-keeping system, according to Brian Jackson. In Brian’s example, SaaS has taken the manual documentation effort away and not incurred more effort from their IT department.

And if that wasn’t enough, here is CIO Zone’s 60 fastest growing companies. Trizetto Group is ranked 14th with revenues of $452 million. Google and their Google Health for patient records is ranked 2nd with $16 billion in revenues. And Microsoft and their Health Vault is ranked 15th with $58 billion in revenues.

This goes to show that customers and people are asking for better solutions and some of those solutions are hosted in the internet.