Conference on IT in healthcare

Bangalore, Oct 26 (UNI) Leading consultancy organisation Frost and Sullivan will organise a multi-city knowledge workshop during November and December on challenges of mid-size hospitals in the country and how Information Technology could solve them.

The workshop would address the growth and increasing trend of IT requirements in mid-size hospitals. Beginning in Bangalore on November 18, the workshop would also be organised in Mumbai on December nine and Delhi on December 16.

Frost and Sullivan, in a release here, said the aim of these workshops was to enable hospitals emerge as efficient healthcare providers - by providing participants an interactive platform to discuss challenges and propose solutions for high voltage efficiency gains. This workshop would provide the top management of such hospitals insights into a ROI maximisation approach for IT investments.

Globally, the healthcare industry was considered as one of the biggest spenders on IT. In India, IT in healthcare was a recent phenomenon and IT-enabled processes in healthcare had so far been restricted to large tertiary hospitals. However, with growing competitiveness in healthcare delivery formats, the mid-size Indian healthcare provider was increasingly turning to IT tools and applications to gain that edge. Health IT offered manifold benefits of improved patient safety and satisfaction as well as maximisation of operational efficiencies.

According to Frost and Sullivan, there were close to 1,000 mid-size hospitals in metros, A and B type cities in India. This segment provided single specialty, multi-specialty and general medical services. Frost and Sullivan recently conducted an extensive research on such hospitals to understand the various challenges faced by top-tier management of such hospitals and how they have embraced IT to solve them.

Frost and Sullivan estimated that in the last three years, the average spending on IT procurement had increased from Rs one million to Rs 4.5 - six million and for new hospital projects, it had gone up to Rs one crore and above. The Compound Annual Growth Rate for investment in IT upgradation was approximately 35 to 50 per cent.

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