India Healthcare IT Spending To Hit $1.05bn In 2013

India's healthcare providers are projected to spend 57 billion rupees ($1.05 billion) on IT products and services in 2013, with the highest growth in expenditure to go toward the salaries of IT staff. 

In a statement Thursday, research firm Gartner reported that healthcare providers in the country will increase their IT spending by a massive seven percent in 2013, taking it from 53 billion rupees ($977.6 million) in 2012. Spending will be made on products and services such as internal IT staff, hardware, software, external IT services, and telecommunications.

Spending on internal IT staff will see the highest growth at 18 percent, compared with other categories. Spending on external IT services will rank second highest at 9.7 percent to reach 14.5 billion rupees ($267.5 million), up from 13.2 billion rupees ($243.5 million) in 2012, driven by growth in process management and consulting.

Spending on telecommunications, which includes networking equipment and services, will remain the largest overall spending category. The segment will grow 3.9 percent to reach 17.2 billion rupees ($317.3 million), up from 16.6 billion rupees in 2012, with most growth coming from enterprise communication equipment.

Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner, said in the statement, “Rising demand from the growing middle-class in India's large cities is fuelling growth in private-sector healthcare. Large national and state government programs will spur growth along the primary and secondary care sector and public health domain.”