Healthcare IT is the software that clinics and hospitals run on, from the first phone call or booking to the doctor's note and the bill. It is also called health IT, or health information technology. Today, every step of a visit to a doctor leaves data in some system.
Consider an ordinary visit to a doctor, step by step. You book a slot, on the phone or in an app. A reminder arrives the day before. At the clinic, you fill in a form about your allergies and your medicines. The doctor reads your history on a screen, examines you and writes a note. The doctor orders a blood test and writes a prescription. The bill is produced from the same record. A few days later, you may get a message asking how you are.
This scene groups that software into three zones.
The first zone is patient engagement: the work before and after the doctor. Scheduling and intake software books the appointment and collects the forms online. A doctor appointment booking app lets patients find a doctor and book a slot themselves. More and more often, an AI medical receptionist, a voice agent, answers the clinic's phone.
The second zone is the electronic health record (EHR). The EHR holds a patient's diagnoses, medicines, allergies, test results and notes. It is the clinic's system of record, the one database that everyone treats as the official version. A clinic runs on an ambulatory EHR, and a whole hospital runs on a hospital EHR. An AI medical scribe now listens to the visit and drafts the doctor's note.
The third zone is telemedicine: seeing a doctor on a video or voice call, through a telemedicine app. This matters in India, because most specialists work in the large cities.
The market is split in two. Much of the software in the first two zones is sold to clinics and hospitals in the United States. There, the government pushed almost every clinic and hospital to adopt an EHR, so the market is very large. In American healthcare, the insurers and government plans that pay the bills are called payers, and the clinics and hospitals are called providers. A large share of this American software is built by engineers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. The hospital records, booking apps and telemedicine apps in this scene that are used by Indian patients are built for India.
India is also linking records across hospitals. Under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), each person can get an ABHA number, a health ID. With the patient's consent, records from different hospitals, labs and apps can be linked to it. Sharing records between systems in a common format is called interoperability. Finally, every visit is turned into medical codes, standard codes for each diagnosis and each procedure, from which the insurer is billed.