I have been doing a survey on what organizations are doing with SharePoint. There were three questions, the second of which was an industry classification. For some industries, I received enough responses to give an industry breakdown.

Here is the chart for Healthcare (19 responses):

In comparison to the Overall Analysis:

• “Providing document management services” is the most frequently used area for SharePoint by healthcare organizations, followed by “Supporting team collaboration” and “Publishing Intranet content.” For the overall respondents, the document management capabilities ranked third, not first. Healthcare organizations are ahead of the overall pack by just over 10% points for document management, and roughly speaking, behind by 10% points in the other two areas.
• In a strange twist, the greater reliance on SharePoint for document management has not carried through to a greater use of SharePoint for “Powering enterprise search.” Healthcare organizations use SharePoint search half as much as the overall base. It could be that they have search products and services in place.
• There is much less use of SharePoint among healthcare organizations for “Encouraging social collaboration” (6% healthcare, 28% overall), “Providing business intelligence and insight” (10% healthcare, 23% overall), and “Creating business applications” (16% healthcare, 37% overall).
• The largest growth areas for healthcare organizations over the next 12 months are “Powering enterprise search,” “Providing business intelligence and insight,” and “Encouraging social collaboration.” Within 12 months however, healthcare organizations will have less use of each of these areas than the overall respondent base.
• The proportion of respondents saying they would “never” use SharePoint for a particular area is about equal across healthcare and the overall base. A notable difference is “Encouraging social collaboration,” where no healthcare respondents ruled out using SharePoint for this, compared to 8% for the overall. Given the low current base of usage in healthcare, this is likely to suggest that it’s still early days for this concept, and none of the respondents had sufficient evidence or experience to rule it out. Once pilots and trials have taken place, this may change.

You can see the Overall Analysis based on 239 responses.