Investment opportunities in health care sector:

The key areas of opportunity within the Indian Healthcare are: 

1. • Medical Infrastructure 
2. • Telemedicine 
3. • Medical Equipment 
4. • Medical textiles 
5. • Health Insurance 
6. • Clinical Trials 
7. • Health services outsourcing 
8. • Medical value travel 
9. • Training and Education 

 
Telemedicine is another exciting opportunity, which allows even the rural population to access quality healthcare and at the same time,  significantly improves the productivity of medical personnel. In a country of over 1.1 Billion people, the Healthcare system will have to increase the utilization of its existing resources. One important reason is that Telemedicine shall increase the patient base, which in turn will increase occupancy rates of hospitals in the integrated telemedicine model. 

Training and Education is another exciting opportunity: The biggest challenge for the healthcare industry today is an acute shortage of trained personnel, ranging from doctors, nurses, technicians and even healthcare administrators. There could be a shortfall of over 450,000 doctors in the year 2012. Such challenges present an opportunity for both domestic and foreign players in the form of ‘training & education’. Foreign players can enter the market to take a two-fold advantage. One, they get a piece of the booming education sector and two, they can source some of the talent for their own countries as human resources shortage in healthcare will be a global phenomenon. 

Medical equipment forms another promising opportunity within healthcare.         This medical equipment industry is growing at 15% per year. Currently over 65% of the medical equipments are imported and thus lies a key area for forging partnerships across borders. Engineering excellence, cost-effective labor, increasing emphasis on intellectual property rights and most importantly a fast growing domestic market makes India an ideal manufacturing base. 

Medical tourism &textiles : Growth in medical infrastructure will be accompanied by demand for associated products and services. One such important industry is medical textiles and Medical value travel is poised to grow at 15-22% annually. With hospitals moving in for quality accreditations like JCI, NABH & ISO and tie-ups between insurance players and hospitals, this sector has the potential to be a latent growth driver.

Health insurance has the potential to show fantastic top line growth. Premiums grew 133% for private players and for the overall industry premiums grew at 47% in Q1 of 2006. The Health insurance sector will grow to 4300 million by 2012 as compared to 775 million in 2007.   Clinical trials has the potential of becoming a US $1 billion industry by 2010, even though the advantages of trials in India is well known, the industry needs a boost in terms of effective government policies and active interest by the government including effective utilization of established government infrastructure. 

The Health services outsourcing sector has real potential as most of the key components needed for success are present in India and the total size of the industry is set to grow  11to 12% per year. 

The medical infrastructure :. To achieve a realistic targets of 1.85 to 2 beds  per thousand population by 2012 needs an investment of € 57.6 billion(US $80 billion)and hence the government and private players need to focus on their core competencies/responsibilities and work together to reduce inefficiencies and complement each others effort.