Health care is not just the hottest manifesto item in the coming U.S. elections, but the sector also appears to be smitten by the merger-takeover medicine making rounds in the health care IT/BPO services companies. Cognizant, for instance, acquired U.S.-based marketRx; Firstsource too bought an U.S.-based company – MedAssist, which gave the company the required exposure and client base to cater to the health care business; and Apollo Hospitals took over Zavata, also a U.S.-based health care BPO.

And there are other Indian firms too that are on the prowl to acquire overseas companies with a focus on expanding their portfolio in the health care segment. Health-care outsourcing firms such as Helios & Matheson and Globerian are in talks with companies in the U.S.A. and U.K. for buyouts and hope to seal $20 to $100 million deals by early next year.

In fact, today the global medical industry is one of the world's fastest growing industries, absorbing over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations. As a matter of fact, the U.S.A. spends more on health care than any other nation in the world. Current estimates put the U.S. health-care spending at approximately 15 percent of GDP, the world's highest. And the health share of GDP is expected to continue its historical upward trend, reaching 19.6 percent of GDP by 2016.

But this growth was preceded by the diffidence to talk about outsourcing of services — a consequence was all the brouhaha on the $1 billion NHS-BT outsourcing deal. Nevertheless, a number of companies are now going all out to outsource a great deal of high-value services to create a safer universal electronic medical system that is expected to be in place by 2014, in the U.S.A.

Traditionally, only HR processes were being outsourced by this sector as there was resistance in the medical community over the cost of high-end clinical services. But services such as Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are expected to accelerate the trend in outsourcing more technological services of the overall health care market in the coming years.

"Future trend would see a bend towards analytics and more proces-centric work (KPO) as opposed to pure BPO, which I call talent arbitrage and not labor arbitrage," informs Jay Garodia, Sr. VP, Ingenix, one of the largest healthcare information firms in the U.S.A.

In fact, outsourcing of bio-information too is expected to see a rise. ValueNotes, a market analysis and research firm, estimates that the bioinformatics outsourcing services sector in India alone will grow at 25 percent CAGR over the period 2007 to 2010. These figures only go on to prove that there will be an absolute need for the coming generation of physicians to have technology as a tool to provide good patient care.