Global Information Technology company Acropetal Technologies Ltd has set its sights on India for its next phase of growth in the healthcare space. It will target mid-segment hospitals and look at the opportunities arising out of governmental policies under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM).
The whole concept of insurance / payers / clearing houses and structure are currently migrating towards international standards. This is where Acropetal will chip in its experience of global certified and tested Emergency Medical Room and Hospital Information Management Systems platform which would be further localized and simplified specifically for the Indian market. It also has experience in healthcare insurance processes and third party processes like clearing houses from technology and service perspective.
The company’s focus in healthcare IT has been in the Gulf and US markets where it competes with global companies like Epic, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, Inc., eClinicalWorks, GE Healthcare, Allscripts, Cerner, Greenway and McKesson. With its healthcare domain expertise, an Indian entry was planned owing to the opportunity this market offers.
“India in the course of next five years will be one of the leading countries in healthcare in terms of expenditure, innovations, healthcare tourism and insurance,” Ashok Kumar JG, director, Acropetal Technologies Ltd., told Pharmabiz.
The nine-year old Acropetal is looking at the healthcare vertical as one of its growth paths to provide software solutions. In 2009, it sought a stake in Binary Solutions, a Bangalore-based healthcare IT domain expert. The company has geared up to go public and raise Rs 170 crore and has filed the Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) with the SEBI. The effort is to provide innovative solutions across various segments of healthcare among other initiatives including engineering design, IT security consulting and energy and environment consulting.
Presently, healthcare IT solutions is non-patient centric. Hence Acropetal would adopt a patient centric approach. “We endeavour a ‘local-for-local’ strategy for the growing Indian healthcare market. The strategy is to maintain total cost of ownership (TCO) extremely low and focus on improving patient care. Post IPO, the company will target organic and inorganic growth opportunities in the healthcare IT space,” he added.
The country’s healthcare technology space is dominated by domestic IT companies. Being a new entrant in the space its competition includes Wipro, GE, Siemens, TCS and SRIT. However, our end-to-end understanding versus just being an EMR or HIMS product vendor gives us a unique competitive edge, stated the Acropetal chief.
Healthcare vertical has been introduced recently and the contribution of this business is less than 1% of the total income of around Rs 75 crore as on December 31, 2009, according to the DRHP filed by the company. However, with focus on healthcare vertical, revenues from this stream may increase significantly.
All healthcare IT solutions are developed at the Bangalore Development Centre. In addition, the entire R & D and Delivery is based out of India. The team size currently comprises 30-40 members.