Indian Healthcare is Simply Not Investing Enough

By:   | Be the first to comment!



Another probable cause for this lack of investment is that Indian healthcare is a capital-intensive industry, featuring substantial payments on land and infrastructure during setup, and routine expenses for the purchase, repair and maintenance of equipment. In such a scenario, hospital management prefer to invest in machinery such as CT Scans, which can begin generating a return immediately, rather than spend on technologies that will have a significant turnaround time before benefits begin to visibly accrue—an unfortunately short-term perspective.

As a consequence, IT vendors in India are not challenged to innovate and develop new software solutions comparable to those followed by the rest of the world.



Potential to radically change the healthcare industry

Objectively, the scope for IT adoption in the healthcare sector is immense, with solutions that can increase efficiency, cut costs and streamline processes. On an immediate basis, good software solutions can help hospitals compensate for an insufficient workforce while compiling and maintaining an ever-increasing volume of patient and administrative data. From core healthcare functions such as maintaining secure centralized patient files or medical records to the complete suite of administrative and management functions including billing processes, procurement and inventory management, improving asset and process optimization, a robust IT system can prove to be a critical transformational tool for a healthcare provider.

Healthcare providers can also leverage trends such as Big Data and data analytics to get the best yield from their investments. These tools make it easier to identify gaps and inefficiencies in processes that could be creating risks and/or substantial costs; complete patient data allows for proper treatment as well as predicting possible illnesses; patient histories can allow trend identification thus allowing time to prepare for and treat imminent illnesses and epidemics.

Easy to use, portable medical data also make it possible for hospitals to overcome some of the limitations and challenges that they traditionally faced—space limitations, being one example. Healthcare providers can cost-effectively serve a lot more patients needing both curative and preventive healthcare leveraging the enormous potential of telemedicine, a still nascent area in India.


Embracing the future of healthcare

It is fairly obvious that investment in IT products and services in healthcare are a surefire way to increase productivity and efficiency while becoming cost effective over the long-term, which makes the initial capital outlay more than worthwhile. The end results absolutely justify and mandate the expense.

But being a cost cutting tool is not the only way that hospitals should view information technology offerings. In addition to the total scope of services offered, hospitals in India need to recognize that packaged software offer the quickest time-to-market for their Patient Satisfaction initiatives. Cloud based solutions further reduce the cost of such solutions. An investment in good quality software on the Cloud can help hospitals keep up with technology whilst reducing cost of ownership at the same time. The time to act is NOW.

The longer Indian healthcare providers put off adopting the best IT tools, the further behind the world will leave them.

Leave a comment