Powered By Blogger

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Health Opportunities

With the healthcare industry witnessing remarkable growth in the last few years, the concept of healthcare has gone beyond hospitals. Instead, it is now related to a gamut of quality services linked to hospitals. This in turn has increased the demand for quality healthcare professionals in India.

Today, healthcare is the third largest service sector — at US $35 billion — in India and is expected to reach US $75 billion in the next five years. Of all the hospital expansions in the near future, the private sector will account for 80% of this spending.

A major challenge for the Indian healthcare industry would be not only to retain the healthcare workforce but to develop an environment that would encourage the NRIs to come back. Even if the number of doctors were to increase from 0.6 to 0.8 per 1,000 and the number of nurses were to increase from 1.5 to 2 per 1,000 to match with international standards, India still would need 2,00,000 doctors and 5,00,000 nurses besides another 2,00,000 healthcare management personnel.

Health care organizations are now realizing that they need MBAs running their organizations as opposed to clinicians. That leaves the industry, in India and abroad, facing a huge hiring opportunity. In response to this, recruiters and university administrators have reported that a constantly growing pool of students and graduate MBAs are now interested in pursuing careers in health care services, biotech firms, and pharmaceutical companies.

Because the competition is poised to increase in terms of quality and quantity with time, there is a demand to acquire the requisite skill sets in clinical, scientific, or health care systems knowledge to stand out. A good school needs to prep students with courses like biomedical marketing, e-health business models, and health care economics and finance, which because of the multi-payer system is strikingly different from finance in other fields. This experience allows graduates to step into product development, product marketing, supply-chain analysis, and senior management roles.

This creates the need for a specialised course in healthcare and MBA in healthcare management is the answer to this need.