What was the idea behind setting up the Asia Pacific Health Practice (APAC) division? How does India fit into it?
| Janette Benett |
The Asia Pacific Health Practice (APAC) has been set up to co-ordinate and drive our health strategy and capabilities in the region while ensuring that each country evolves and tunes their approach to respond to the local market, managing the delivery of our existing health contracts, business development activity and growing our existing business in the region. Health is a local business and it’s really important that we have the right capabilities and resources in place to best serve customers in the region.
In India, we intend to target the healthcare IT spend of private hospital chains beginning with core BT products such as BT One, Assure, Advise, Compute and Connect. Target customers include private/ corporate sector hospital chains, speciality hospitals and greenfield hospital projects. We see great potential for the role of IT in advancing national health programmes to millions of Indians.
How huge is IT healthcare APAC market? By how much is it expected to grow in the next few years? What is the YoY growth? What share of this is British Telecom (BT) aiming at?
BT’s strength in health IT infrastructure and services is well positioned to bring value to new hospitals and hospital upgrades and as such will be our first target market. Excluding Japan, the overall health IT market in Asia Pacific is valued at about £7.1 billion in 2011/12.
BT estimates that its current addressable market in healthcare in the region is £1.3 billion in 2012/13, growing to £1.6 billion by 2014/15 which is a CAGR of 10 per cent (based on IDC Model 2011 and IDC Public sector market sizing. This includes BT propositions mapped to the physician and hospital segments of the health market.)
What experience can BT draw upon from its work in other regions to deliver healthcare infrastructure solutions in countries like India and other in APAC region?
BT is one of the largest providers of communication services across the globe delivering solutions in more than 170 countries. We have been working on a wide range of health IT business across the Asia Pacific region, including complex and large infrastructure contracts for new hospitals, clinical safety management consultancy, and electronic health records work. From my experience, I can say that our world-class management experience of building large scale programmes and our ability to deliver end-to-end services is a great asset and differentiator. These experiences have helped us share some of the best-practices and learnings from one country to the other.
For instance, in the UK, we are one of the largest suppliers of IT and communications services to the National Health Service (NHS), helping them provide better, safer and more efficient healthcare. Our experience from implementing such a large scale programme can be leveraged in India as well, considering the large scale population and diversity that the country has to offer. Every country today struggles with the issue of addressing the demand of many and India is no different. This is where our experience of delivering a programme of complex and large scale is an added advantage.
Another example that comes to my mind is from Singapore, where we are IT partners for Connexion at The Farrer Park Company. This is Singapore’s first integrated healthcare and hospitality complex, comprising a specialist medical centre, a private tertiary hospital, and a luxury hotel with state-of-the-art conference and wellness facilities. Given the varied range of solutions, BT has the ability to provide the same comprehensive range of programme management and systems integration services in India as well as helping position the country as one of the leading health tourism facilities in the region.
Our learning in addressing the need of health markets world over has resulted in continuous evolution in our strategies in the APAC region. In markets like India and China, we are working on delivering a solution which brings together patient information, held in multiple disparate systems, to provide a single source of information for patients’ medical records.
What is BT’s key differentiator in the healthcare space?
Our products and services centre around core capabilities in infrastructure management, security, unified communications and mobility, drawing on the expertise of BT Advise, which brings together experts who deliver consulting, systems integration and managed services. The eHospital solution brings together the best in digital networked ICT services to help customers create a healthcare environment where they can give patients a better experience, boost organisational efficiency and staff productivity and keep costs in control. It’s not about ICT imposing change; it’s a way to support the work-flow changes that clinicians themselves are demanding. BT has a strong track record in Tele-health & Electronic Health Record (EHR) and areas which we believe the Indian administration would like to progress and collaborate on. All the solutions above are not exclusive to the Indian market and are offered to the other markets as well in the APAC region. As the UK and India markets are very different, the portfolios are customised as per the needs of these markets.
Primary doctors and specialists are on an equal footing for healthcare IT adoption in the UK vis-a-vis India. How important has government policy been in this regard especially with the NHS encouraging the system? What are the lessons to be learnt for India?
In the UK, funding of healthcare is through taxation and General Practitioners (GPs) contract with the NHS for the delivery of services. IT is used to process all payments to GPs for those services who in so doing provide a huge amount of information on the patient which is analysed at practice, regional and country wide levels to identify areas in need of improvement or good practice that others could learn from. This includes establishing disease prevalence, interventions and treatment undertaken and outcome. It would be impossible to for individual GPs to provide this level of information without IT automating the data collection and reporting process.
In India the funding model is different, with patients bearing out of pocket expenditure when seeing a GP. Government policy will be essential in terms of finding ways to encourage and reward GP uptake of IT as well as potentially funding it, so that individual and wider public health improvements can be achieved. Government intentions regarding universal insurance coverage may facilitate this along with newer ways of providing software such as software as a service that can assist in achieving the desired outcomes. The prevailing Public health infrastructure requires an urgent revamp to provide health care access to the non-urban and semi urban with safe and affordable health care.
What are the trends that will shape Healthcare IT of the future?
Electric Health Record systems would help health care stakeholders share vital medical reports, data and information. With the increased use of tablets and other mobile devices, EHR data, reference medical material, and a host of valuable data that in the past was only available in the office or hospital can now be accessed on these devices improving patient outcomes. Personal Health Record system is also gaining importance as it helps individuals and their health care providers to manage basic health requirements. This trend is fast shaping the healthcare sector as it empowers patients to manage their health between visits to the hospitals.
How many people will be recruited as a part of the India centre? What kind of partnerships are you looking at?
Although we do not break out numbers as per verticals, we have more than 800 employees In India who are committed to ensuring our success in the Indian market. In India we intend to target the healthcare IT spend of private hospital chains beginning with core BT products such as BTOne, Assure, Advise, Compute, and Connect. While our target customers include private/corporate sector hospital chains, speciality hospitals and Greenfield hospital projects, we would like to work closely with public sector and Brownfield installations as there exists great potential for the role of IT in advancing national health programmes to millions and millions of Indians across the diverse sub-continent.
With the huge costs that it entails to bring technology to the masses and an increasing focus of governments worldwide in reducing healthcare costs, how challenging it is for companies such as yours to provide affordable healthcare at the same not comprising on technology?
The prevailing Public health infrastructure requires an urgent revamp to provide health care access to the non-urban and semi urban with safe and affordable health care. Delivering affordable health care to India’s large population presents enormous challenges and opportunities for the medical community. Innovative technologies, processes and partnerships forged by the Indian government and private companies have begun bridging the health care gap. In order to achieve the best outcomes for patients and healthcare providers it is important to include ICT planning at the design stage of hospital construction. The country will witness great benefits from modernisation of hospitals and general health services.
shalini g@expressindia.com