India's Medico-IT spend to touch $1 B
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 18 April 2007, 19:30 IST
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The next five years will see a boom in the IT spending by the healthcare sector . According to the business standard, industry sources estimate that looking at the enormous growth of the number of hospital beds every year and mushrooming of new hospitals, the healthcare industry is projected to spend about $1 billion dollars toward healthcare management applications from the current $300 million outlay. The newspaper reports that as per the global standard, each hospital spends about 1.5 to 2 percent of their total annual revenue towards the building up of IT infrastructure. Although the healthcare sectorin India is being considered as one of the lowest spenders, looking at the growth in the number of foreign patients and opportunities in emerging areas like medical tourism apart from large hospitals , even the medium sized hospitals are also waking up to the need of having a comprehensive IT platform. This will help them in taking care of the patients' records , customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and financial control among others, says Mohammad Naseem, VP-Healthcare, IBM India. Traditionally the hospitals in the US are considered large spenders in IT and invest about 3 percent of their revenues in IT, followed by European hospitals. At present most hospitals in India spend about 0.5 percent of their revenues in IT. It solutions providers atre witnessing a tremendous traction from them. According to CII-Mckinsey study, the healthcare sector in India is expected to become a $47 billion industry by 2012.

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