Management consulting leader, Zinnov Management consulting, has unveiled launched it’s study  on how far the Indian healthcare sector is exploiting the Cloud.

Entitled ‘Cloud Computing: An enabler of IT in Indian Healthcare Sector’, the study, finds the total addressable opportunity for Cloud solutions in the Indian healthcare industry (Hospitals) could be around $600 million by 2020. The Cloud can potentially address close to 40% of the total annual healthcare IT spending in India. The current healthcare spending stands at $54 billion and is expected to reach $164 billion by 2019-20. The estimated annual IT spending within existing hospitals in India is approximately $191 million currently and is expected to reach$1.5 billion by 2020.

The study highlights some intriguing trends that are currently taking place in the healthcare industry across the three service models of Cloud, i.e. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing will create opportunities in software for the sector, while the opportunity for hardware and services will come from IaaS and PaaS respectively, says Zinnov.

Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, Pvt. Ltd, says, “The healthcare infrastructure in India is currently chasing a 50% gap compared to its global peers. This highlights an urgent need to scale up the infrastructure to cater to a population of over a billion. This also opens up a huge opportunity for ‘Cloud’, which has the potential to radically transform the healthcare landscape in India.”

A preliminary assessment of the various hospital functions was conducted as a part of the study, highlighting the opportunity areas within these functions that have the potential of shifting to cloud based solutions. These include administrative functions like In-house communication, HR/ Payroll Management, Procurement/Material and Inventory Management of drugs and essential supplies as well as revenue functions like Maintaining accounts, Healthcare claim data management and Billing/ Charges capturing. The study also highlights opportunity areas within functions like Capacity planning, Capturing of Basic care data and Clinical data, where cloud can be leveraged by the Indian hospitals.
The study highlights that Cloud based solutions can potentially help in improving two aspects of Indian Healthcare services delivery i.e.lowering IT Infrastructure cost – Cloud Computing can help reduce cost by approximately 30% -- and augmenting service quality at less cost to hospitals – Cloud Computing can potentially help in delivering applications such as CRM ,which in turn would help improve user experience.