Next month global healthcare leaders would meet at New Orleans in the US. The global Health information management and systems society or HIMSS is the mecca for healthcare technology. Many interesting concepts dominate this year’s conference including Digital Hospital and Care Coordination.

But often the question asked is where is India from a healthcare perspective?

Well India is on its way to healthcare technology adoption, but the pace of change has been slow. A vast majority on healthcare providers in India still rely on paper records. This is because the  as the benefits of digitization have to be balanced with the hard reality of costs. As most healthcare in India is funded by individuals, providers are reluctant to digitize as this would increase costs in the short run.

Also digitization of records can invoke greater scrutiny of hospital financial records. Never the less healthcare in India is on the way to adopt technology. Many providers over the last few years have started giving orders for servers, which is the starting point of digitization. In a decade or two most would be adopting electronic medical records as well.

Till that happens I think India would still view HIMSS as just a technology conference from the west and not something that they would be interested in.