India’s rapidly growing economy is changing the way consumers, providers, payers, and investors view healthcare services. Evolving demographics, a shifting disease burden, informed consumer choices, innovative technologies, increasing attention to health and wellness by diverse stakeholders to address social determinants of health are influencing trends in the healthcare sector and also offer new opportunities and challenges. Quality, evidence-based decision-making, personalised and targeted organ treatment, concern for better health outcomes, and value-addition are the new slogans.

There is a clear need for cost-effective, state-of-art, technology-based healthcare solutions to satisfy clients and enhance institutional reach to those neglected so far. This necessitates keeping pace with rapid changes and preparing a roadmap that would help them deliver an integrated, regulation compliant, quality and patient-oriented care. Be it a hospital, NGO, public health establishment or a healthcare information technology organisation moving from numbers to quality, it should invest in people, processes, and technology for a successful transition. Making such transitions mandates the availability of skilled human resources well trained in managing hospitals and healthcare institutions.

India’s healthcare sector is growing at a rapid pace owing to its expanding coverage, range of services and increasing public as well as private expenditure. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India has predicted that with increased digital adoption the Indian healthcare market, which is worth around US$ 100 billion, is likely to grow to US$ 280 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 23 per cent. By 2020, three major sectors — medical tourism, healthcare information technology and pharmaceuticals are projected to grow to $8 billion, $2.5 billion, and $20 billion respectively.

However, there are still numerous challenges facing the industry. One significant recent development is the growing dissatisfaction and violence against healthcare providers by patients and their relatives. Among many other reasons such as lack of resources, low quality service and a lack of efficient management of the hospital is a major underlying factor. Many healthcare providers lack good communication and coordination traits, lack training in people interaction, time management and/or emergency handling skills.

These skills are not included in most curricula in undergraduate and post graduate teaching. The situation is worsening with new hospitals sprouting throughout the country with most of the staff being fresh graduates or lacking the mandatory experience for their field. What is needed is a professional who understands health issues and handles the patient with empathy working with hospital staff to improve the quality of patient care. She requires problem solving skills and relevant knowledge.

Every healthcare organisation needs personnel who can handle administration, billing, finance, HR, inventory and the large quantity of data generated on daily basis. Currently the demand overweighs the supply and this is likely to continue for some years. Public health institutions are no better off. Public health managers who can handle efficient monitoring and implementation of health programmes are in great demand.

With Ayushman Bharat set to establish more than 1.5 lakh health and wellness centres and increase coverage of services to 50 crore individuals under the National Health Protection Scheme, it would be difficult for the existing machinery to achieve desired targets. Healthcare managers employed at appropriate levels  can provide the necessary support and monitoring for successful implementation and improving the overall health status of individuals.

Healthcare management is growing by leaps and bounds as a very sought-after career opportunity. It offers diverse options in the hospital and public health domain. Patient safety and quality management coordinators, hospital operation managers, assistant medical superintendents, CEOs, training coordinators, TPA managers, biomedical waste managers, block and district programme managers, MIS experts, consultants at NGOs, programme monitoring and evaluation experts are just some of the major career pathways involved.

Technology is quickly turning healthcare to tech enabled care. India’s digital connectivity is expected to grow from 15 per cent in 2014 to 80 per cent access in 2034, with rural Internet users increasing by 58 per cent annually and by another 34.85 per cent through mobile connectivity by 2021.

Technology demand is expected to optimise costs, enable effective management of operations and help develop more efficient systems for storage and retrieval of information. This includes medical terminologies, clinical guidelines, standards, virtual hospitals, wearable devices and use of computer hardware and software. The coming years are expected to witness greater deployment of health information technologies and tools like electronic medical records, family health record, telemedicine, hospital management information systems, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, m-health, wireless sensors, digital diagnostics, and data analytics.

Professionals who can adopt new technology to healthcare, who can design and implement information systems and act as bridge between healthcare and information technology professionals are, even now, in great demand. They could be working in hospitals (public and private), IT companies, Insurance companies, government organisations, NGOs and R&D organisations as hospital IT managers, HMIS experts, CIOs, data analysts, business analysts, requirement specialists, market research analysts, implementation experts or project leaders.

The writer is an associate professor, International Institute of Health Management Research, New Delhi