30 Minute Interview

'Over 90% Healthcare Provider Market in India is Unorganised'

IBM has been present in India since 1992 and is serving the healthcare industry since it entered the Indian market. The company has a dedicated team of domain specialist and business consultants, who identify the needs of the industry and address them appropriately. Mohammad Naseem, Head of IBM's Healthcare Practice in India, speaks to Nancy Singh about company's involvement in Indian healthcare space, products offered and challenges in front and future plans. Excerpts:

Please tell us about IBM's involvement in healthcare.

IBM provides complete IT solution for healthcare industry. We partner with them right from infrastructure transformation— building blocks, to process transformation, bringing efficiency and clinical edge and finally helping in information transformation which results in improving and innovating new care procedures for better patient service.

What are the kind of products and services available in healthcare space?

In healthcare space, IBM provides business and IT consulting services; application implementation services; software products for collaboration, messaging, data management, security and directory services; infrastructure and resource management services and related hardware products like servers and storage boxes.

What prospects do you foresee for IT in healthcare?

IT in healthcare is at a nascent stage, hence opportunities are huge. We saw this early from our competition and invested in people who come from the industry. This team helped in identifying the opportunities for solution areas and for building right partner ecosystem, apart from creating tremendous thought leadership for IBM in this space.

Why is it that IT has not been able to make a significant presence in healthcare in India?

Healthcare provider market is highly fragmented (94 per cent unorganised) and dominated by largely very small players. Hence, IT uptake is limited to custom developed software for areas like billing and patient scheduling. Health insurance segment is just picking steam and large players are emerging. Dependence of IT is huge for insurance segment and we are seeing that trend. In pharmaceutical segment, IT is more prevalent in manufacturing space, as ERP is an important component of supply chain management. However, we will be seeing more of IT deployment in contract research space.

What are the kinds of challenges you faced to establish in the Indian market and how did you overcome them?

Computerisation of healthcare record keeping remains both a need and a challenge in India. Healthcare is moving in the direction of computerisation. IBM's focus is on developing applications and solutions which will address the growing need for automation in revenue management, performance management and patient care systems in hospitals.

How different is the Indian healthcare IT market than other countries?

Healthcare in India is largely paid by out of pocket expenses, as compared to some of the developed countries, which has third party payment mechanism firmly in place. Hence, consumers are highly price conscious, which also makes provider very sensitive towards the cost of medical procedures.

How many countries are you present in and what is the strength in India?

IBM Corporation has presence in more than 170 countries across the world, with over 3,88,000 employees. We at IBM have 73,000 employees in India, as of December 2007.

nancy.singh@expressindia.com