| Indians
“taking care of IT” for US healthcare
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With severe pressure to improve
service levels while keeping costs low, the US
healthcare industry alone is expected to spend
$34 bn to develop supporting technologies by 2008,
against $26 bn last year, according to recent
research reports. Traditionally, the healthcare
industry has been a laggard in adoption of technologies.
However, there has been a renewed momentum, driven
by the Bush administration's push for IT in healthcare.
Britain is another country that is increasingly
realising the importance of this. It has already
announced several multi-billion IT projects to
support its healthcare industry.
All these have expanded the healthcare IT market
opportunities for India in terms of automation,
clinical process outsourcing, data monitoring,
reading of magnetic resonance images (MRI), EEGs,
ECGs, insurance claim processing and payment processing.
The domestic providers are currently in the process
of acquiring domain expertise. The last quarter
also witnessed a spate of mergers and acquisitions
in the space, including large deals like IBM-HealthLink,
MphasiS-Eldorado, Accenture-CapGemini's hospital
division and WNS Global Services-Claims BPO. Companies
like Wipro, Infosys and Syntel are also likely
to get into such mergers and acquisitions, say
industry sources.
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Our Say |
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| Industry
stalwarts are of the opinion that healthcare
practices are going to be the next BPO
wave after financial services and accounting
practices with many touting it as a
priority sector for outsourcing. Although
healthcare remains a conservative niche,
it could become the natural extension
of other high-end BPO services that
are currently being offered by Indian
providers.
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| More
greenfield shipyards needed to get Indian shipping
into ship shape! |
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| Research by
Visakhapatnam-based National Ship Design and Research
Centre (NSDRC) indicates that India would require
additional 1.78 mn gross registered tonnage (GRT)
in addition to the replacement requirement of about
2.66 mn GRT to meet the growing shipping needs.
New capacity in shipyards needs to be created to
meet the growing needs of both shipbuilding and
repairs to take up higher productivity jobs to withstand
international competition, the study further states.
The study points out that greenfield shipyards,
with a new `gene pool' which utilise the younger,
educated and trained manpower, could only match
the productivity levels of Japanese or Korean yards.
It also stresses the need for increasing productivity
levels to two mn Compensated Gross Tonnage (CGT)
annually against current 0.15 mn CGT. The Indian
shipbuilding sector also needs to strengthen its
skills in production to build Inland Water Transport
(IWT) vessels and port craft rather than building
larger and special vessels.
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Our Say |
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| With
the capacity of yards in US, Russia,
Europe and Japan on the decline, there
is greater demand for more capacity.
To meet this India may need huge investments,
and this could also provide foreign
investors a chance to seek newer market
opportunities. The interesting bit of
the study by the NSDRC is the recognition
of the need for shipyards to pool their
competencies to weld together alliances
in the wake of global competition and
meeting rising vessel requirements.
An interesting offshoot of this development
is that Indian shipyards may outsource
non-core activities such as accounts,
civil maintenance and procurement of
raw materials. This will help them to
shed manpower and purchase in bulk at
bargain prices.
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