Indian healthcare cloud computing to be $600 Million
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 29 September 2010, 23:49 IST   |    3 Comments
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Indian healthcare cloud computing to be $600 Million
New Delhi: The total addressable opportunity for Cloud solutions in the Indian healthcare industry (Hospitals) is estimated at $600 million by 2020. Cloud can potentially address close to 40 percent of the total annual healthcare IT spending in India, reveals a study by Zinnov Management consulting titled 'Cloud Computing: An enabler of IT in Indian Healthcare Sector'. The current healthcare spending stands at $54 billion and is expected to reach $164 billion by 2019-20. Also, the estimated annual IT spending within existing hospitals in India is approximately $191 million currently and is expected to reach a mark of $1.5 billion by 2020. It also brings to light some intriguing trends that are currently taking place in the healthcare industry across the three service models of Cloud, i.e. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The reports says that SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing will create opportunities in software for the sector, while the opportunity for hardware and services will come from IaaS and PaaS respectively. Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting said, "The healthcare infrastructure in India is currently under invested with more than 50 percent gap compared to its global peers. This highlights an urgent need to scale up the infrastructure to cater to a population of over a billion. This opens up a huge opportunity for 'Cloud', which has the potential to radically transform the healthcare landscape in India." A preliminary assessment of the various hospital functions was conducted as a part of the study, bringing to light the opportunity areas within these functions that have the potential of shifting to cloud based solutions. These include administrative functions like In-house communication, HR/Payroll Management, Procurement/Material and Inventory Management of drugs and essential supplies as well as revenue functions like Maintaining accounts, Healthcare claim data management and Billing/ Charges capturing. The highlighted opportunity areas within functions are Capacity planning, Capturing of Basic care data and Clinical data, where cloud can be leveraged by the Indian hospitals. Speaking about the market drivers and potential opportunity, Animesh Khan, Manager-Consulting, Zinnov Management consulting, said, "Considering most of the Indian hospitals outsource their IT functions, 'Cloud Computing' becomes a natural fit. Furthermore, new regulatory measures are helping to augment the cause of cloud based services and solutions for the Indian healthcare industry." The opportunity for Cloud based solutions among Indian hospitals lies across the Cloud service (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) and delivery model matrix (Private, Public, Hybrid). Across the three Cloud delivery models, Private and Hybrid Cloud are expected to find greater acceptance among large hospitals. On the other hand, the Public Cloud is expected to find preference among small and medium hospitals for SaaS and IaaS.

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