The demand for healthcare services in India has grown from $ 4.8 billion in 1991 to $ 22.8 billion in 2001-02, indicating an annual growth rate of 16 %. The healthcare industry accounted for 5.2 per cent of India’s GDP in 2002, and this figure could reach $ 47 billion or 6.2—7.5 per cent of GDP by 2012.Also, the Indian middle class with its increasing purchasing power is willing to pay for improving health care facilities and the supply of healthcare services is growing steadily, as the private sector becomes more involved in owning and running hospitals.
Today, better healthcare services are the prime concern of any individual. Patient data security and efficiency in the process of healthcare is considered to be quite important. People are moving towards such healthcare institutes which offer the best healthcare services. Thus technological advancements are a must in the healthcare services offered by healthcare organizations so as to meet the increasing demands of the population. On one hand the healthcare services offered by various institutes needs to be effective in its working while on the other it needs to be cost effective due to increasing competition between the healthcare service providers.
IT can act as a major component to solve this problem. Using technology in Health care will help improving various processes like patient diagnosis, data management, e-prescription, pathology lab management, appointment scheduling, case analysis etc. In India, so far the investment done in IT by the healthcare sector has been insufficient. This may result in increased investments to be made by healthcare organizations in the near future due to rising cost, regulatory compliances and technological advancements in healthcare services.
Today, the emerging trends of IT in healthcare Industry has taken a different form. New technologies in the healthcare management systems have come up which consists of electronic data storage, data maintenance and exchange. Such process when implemented will make the healthcare management process effective. Example of such type of healthcare management system is Electronic Medical Records (EMR).
In this, Individual patient records can be stored and managed electronically, reducing the time, money and space which is wasted in maintaining patient records in the form of written document. This data can be easily transferred from one location to some other location located on the same network. Thus if the patient is unable to visit one location where he had previously taken some treatment can visit other location nearby, access his medical history and take further treatment.
e- Prescription is also one of the emerging technologies in the Healthcare industry wherein the prescriber (doctor) can send his prescription through a computer network to some medical store. Thus, the patient need not carry his prescription or draft it to some medical store. This will help in avoiding errors that can take place due to various reasons like ambiguity in the doctor’s hand writing etc.
Medical Tourism and Healthcare outsourcing also has gained momentum these days helping the patients in reducing the cost associated with healthcare services. A lot of people from foreign countries do visit India to get their treatment done. This helps in exchange of information and transfer of knowledge related to new technologies.
Problems faced by Healthcare service providers:
The healthcare service providers have to face many problems while designing and implementation of healthcare management systems. Different healthcare organizations do have different software requirements depending on their size of working, management system, infrastructure etc. This makes it difficult for the healthcare service providers to design different software programs for different healthcare organizations depending on their requirements, lowering the quality of services offered by them.
In order to avoid such problems, some standards must be set depending on which the designing can be done. These standards must satisfy the requirements of most of the healthcare organizations. Such standards are used in America. According to the American Association of healthcare service providers, the institutes are divided into various different categories, some specific standards are set for each category. Depending on these standards the service providers design their software. Such type of a system is not yet implemented in India.
The healthcare institutes are facing problems in implementing such systems because they have to make changes in their whole working system depending upon the software that they are using. Making changes in the whole working system of a major institute will take long time. Also, high expenses are incurred in installing and implementing such systems.
Such technological improvements in Indian healthcare society will attract more number of customers from other countries making an increment in the total domestic economy .This will help in resolving the problems like availability of resources and will help in overall development of the country ,making it the ultimate choice of the global market for Healthcare.
