IT in healthcare can reduce rising government costs

What are the key requirements for an IT company working in the healthcare sector?

If I look at the challenges today in healthcare and what we need to respond to, first of all we need to help governments address rising costs. Second, we need to help them provide access to remote areas and deal with a shortage of specialists. This is a key thing, especially in our emerging market; we're dealing with remote sites, limited number of specialists. And I think the third challenge is improving quality with timely and correct diagnoses.

This is a key point - something like 18% of errors are due to incomplete patient data and this is a global statistic. As you can imagine incomplete patient data leads to medical errors. More complete and further integrated patient data facilitates improved physician decision making. And on the other side, if you cannot trace or look at history of patients, that obviously adds to costs and duplication of procedures. I think with duplication of procedures, if you can eliminate it through centralised access to patient information there are significant benefits in terms of quality and reducing extra costs.

How big a market is the Middle East for this sector?

The Middle East represents our biggest market, I think there is different data published but its anywhere from £100-500m in terms of the market size because I think you have to ask the question of what market do we respond to and where is the opportunity to be able to help customers.
The key thing which is driving the market is demand for digitalisation, which enables doctors to make informed decisions. If you look at recent graduates from medical schools and the specialists when they come out of schools in the Middle East, they actually demand the availability of the integrated technologies so I think there is great positive momentum in the market. It's an exciting market and one that has the potential to be even bigger.

What technological trends are you seeing in this industry?

The biggest trend we see is integrating and aggregating critical data. Customers that I speak to are talking about simplifying collection and exchange of data across a wide variety of legacy systems including hospital information systems, radiology information systems, lab, pharmacy and other systems. This is the one especially for governments which has become the key issue. This is the opportunity to create the infrastructure to have one view for patients.

How was IT in healthcare affected by the economic downturn?

I see this market as robust. A great thing about this region is that governments are treating this as a real priority. Improving quality of access is a real priority here. So on the public side there has been great momentum. I think the private side has been fluctuating, but the public market has been robust and continues to grow.

What does the future hold for this sector?

If you look at the path ahead, at the end of the day, what are we here for? We're here to help our customers and improve healthcare quality for the patients. That can be done in a number of ways, number one - help the physicians make better decisions through enabling information in the decision making process. Number two is to improve access to healthcare through telemedicine. These are not difficult things to achieve. The third one is to allow physicians and specialists and care providers to connect and collaborate. This is a key requirement to make better decisions and it helps in terms of staff productivity when faced with limited resources. I think in all of those areas in the mid range, those are the opportunities we are pursuing, those are the opportunities we are talking about to our customers about, they see the benefits and they see the advantages.