U.S. unveils multi-billion dollar opportunity for Indian IT

U.S. President Barrack Obama's incessant push for a better healthcare sector in U.S. will be the silver-lining for the staggered IT service sector in India, as it unveils a multi-biilion dollar opportunity. Obama has allocated $37 billion of stimulus funding to drive the adoption of EHRs and as per McKinsey estimates the resulting growth in EHRs will require an overall spend of $175 billion.

The EHR rollout will need the Indian IT firms' deep expertise in services such as systems integration, application management and legacy modernization, as the established software vendors lack the manpower to provide the services. Nearly, $50 billion of the spending will be devoted to IT services and training.

The second big opportunity for Indian firms lies in BPO. The reform will see an influx of over 30 million newly covered individuals; insurers will look to outsourcing partners to help them enroll new members and process their call and claim needs. The rising cost pressures will force insurers and hospitals to concentrate only on a few core functions (such as benefit and services design, sales and marketing). The rest of the back-office services like member database management, claims processing and support services - enrolment processing, will be outsourced.

The final opportunity hold big for the players in the data analytics market. These could range from comparative effectiveness research into different treatments or drug combinations to analysis of call, claims and clinical data for customer lifecycle needs and marketing. McKinsey estimates that the overall market for 'real world data' analytics could be worth over $10 billion.