IT Applications in the Health Sector

“The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs- a small army of ‘geeks’ who have reshaped our world… that was the easy part… we now have to apply these technologies for saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of the squalor, misery and suffering,… the time has come to move our focus from the geek to the meek” Sir Arthur C. Clarke.Today the world is in the midst of a technological revolution driven by IT applications, which is so ubiquitous that the accompanying innovations almost qualify it as a general purpose technology. India is today a globally accepted giant and an IT power to reckon with. The question then is, to what extent is the technology being used in the health care sector, what are the perceptions regarding IT particularly to meet the challenges of improvement in quality and service; customer (patient) satisfaction; reduction in costs through resource optimization; increase in productivity and outreach and adoption of various management techniques to improve efficiency and adaptation to the technological changes in health care. The study explores such aspects in the Indian context, specifically Uttar Pradesh.