Is health tech in India about to take off?

The healthcare IT sector in India is on a constant growth path. IT for healthcare has two parts, technological and the other is analytical. Current market size as per Gartner report is in tune of Rs5000crores and is growing at the rate of 7% per annum. The major growth drivers include rising awareness and demand for higher level of healthcare need use of EMR and the requirement of cashless payments or insurance and speedy settlements of claims need IT enablement.Also, increase in medical tourism is making hospitals invest in state of art IT set up to attract patients from abroad.

Union Budget 2015-16 announced to support the health sector in a big way and has shown outlay for health in the Budget of Rs.33,150 cr. Moreover, announcement of five AIIMS in Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Assam and Tamil Nadu and AIIMS-like institute in Bihar will provide a quantum jump in healthcare and IT opportunity in these states and the neighboring areas.The additional focus towards the strengthening of the IT infrastructure, the backbone of the Indian start up industry will accelerate the industry growth.

A promising budget is released from a start-up perspective and rate of Income-tax on royalty and fees for technical services reduced from 25% to 10% to facilitate technology inflow, few of the expected changes have been postponed for next year such as service tax relaxation on products and the simplifying the complex Company Act 2013.

Indian hospitals and many health institutions have started investing in multiple applications like HIS, LIS, RIS, EMR etc but the challenge is to integrate all such systems and make the data inter portable and seamlessly available to the user. Also, security is an integral aspect of health IT infrastructure especially of clinical data that is built with the combination of software, hardware and networking systems.

With international medical tourism opportunities, globalization and increasing regulatory pressure Healthcare organizations will also have to accept strategic role of IT tools soon.