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: The perception about IT in hospitals is undergoing a paradigm shift. Earlier, much of the IT deployment was focused on improving the billing and patient registration procedures. Now with differential service levels and facilities being made available to patients by various hospitals, IT is seen to be the key link that has the potential to integrate the entire healthcare system and improve processes, efficiency and overall experience of patient care cycle.

This dependency of the healthcare sector on IT has turned into a lucrative business opportunity for the IT companies. Globally, the IT expenditure in the healthcare sector is estimated at about $75 billion. Significant investments in hospital management information system (HMIS) are in the pipeline.

In India too, it is poised to grow to $30 billion by 2010, informs Rajendra Ranganathan, head of provider practices at Wipro Technologies.

HMIS is primarily a workflow solution that helps a hospital to assimilate and aggregate information related to patient’s care cycle across various departments and decision makers to cut down waiting times and errors in reporting. From hospitals’ perspective, they can utilise their critical resources at a higher level. No wonder, HMIS will be in the growth phase for the next 10-12 years, says Ajay Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Srishti Software.

If trends emanating from the healthcare sector are an indication, there is a huge shortage of bed capacity in the country. This is expected to spur the growth of several hospitals to meet the demand. If one were to look at the private healthcare IT spending, it is worth mentioning that a good number of hospitals in India are embarking on their tech journey with their first round of computerisation. In short, they consider computerisation of the hospital set up as part of the essential infrastructure. Needless to say, this means more IT spending from government-owned as well as private hospitals.

In addition, healthcare tourism in the country is poised to grow from the present level of $300 million to $2.2 billion by 2012. This would call for higher bed capacity, ultra-modern care centres and availability of patient data remotely. Hence, all these parameters call for a strong impetus towards the deployment of advanced IT solutions in the hospital premises.