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: tasks like X-ray, sonography, ultrasound, etc. KR Sundaam, CIO, KG Hospital says, “We are focusing on the front office—registration, billing, labs, insurance, dietary and pharmacy. Business operations of the hospitals are more dependent on the IT. We are now getting into the clinical systems especially the PACS (picture archiving and communication system).” Globally, the market for HMIS including PACS is estimated around $11 billion.

Typically, a hospital’s main requirements with IT begin with revving up the administrative tasks. These are followed by clinical functions like ICU and dieticians. Then comes the task of deploying IT solutions for revenue management like finance, investment, etc. Nevertheless, the deployment of an integrated hospital management system is a prerequisite to improve the overall efficiency, says Vamsi Chandra Kasivajjala, executive-director (healthcare), Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (SRIT).

An increasing number of hospitals are also loosening their purses to spend on clinical support system. The idea is to capture significant clinical outsourcing work that is coming to Indian shores by way of various pharmaceutical majors.

Analysts inform that even today, some of the major hospitals across India have islands of information that cannot be interconnected, resulting in manual transportation of data, thereby diluting efficacy of automation. It will be another 5-7 years before Indian healthcare sector starts seeing hospitals that are well equipped and well connected in terms of accessibility and availability of information on demand.

At present, there is an equivocal demand for solutions to computerise the clinical operations of the hospital. In the next four to five years, there will be a robust demand for ERP systems and IT solutions for inventories, procurement and electronic medical records, informs Kasivajjala. In a nutshell, healthcare is one of the fastest growing industries in India with heavy investments.