These markets, especially powered by China, account for 59 per cent of the $3.4 billion IT spending in healthcare in Asia (excluding Japan) in 2007, with their share expected to increase to 64 per cent of the spending by 2010, Springboard Research, an IT Market Research firm said.

While it is no surprise to IT vendors that the emerging markets in Asia are growing quickly, the percentage of the total healthcare IT spending could provide a surprise to many vendors, said Springboard Research Research Manager Jonathan Silber.

The key strategy for vendors is to understand the solution trends in each market and tailor their strategies to make sure they are going after their addressable market, instead of just a big number.

With the way the market is fragmented, you can not have a regional strategy it needs to be focused on the countries and solutions where a vendor can execute, added Silber.

Healthcare IT spending in the emerging markets of Asia is still very much a hardware-based play as these economies build their basic IT infrastructure.

Sixty-one per cent of the 2007 spending was on hardware and this is expected to continue relatively steady, dropping slowly to 57 per cent in 2010 as spending starts to move more into software and IT services.

Both software and IT services are expected to grow across these emerging markets at a compound average growth rate of about 15 per cent between 2006 and 2010. 

China is the 800 pound gorilla of technology in the Asian healthcare industry. It is already the largest market and is starting to dwarf the other emerging markets in the region.

If a vendor has limited resources to cover multiple emerging markets in the region, they need to make a key decision on whether to focus their resources solely on China to better capture the opportunity or spread them out among multiple countries where the opportunity is much smaller, Silber said     .

We are seeing the larger vendors with scale, resources and an existing channel network reap the greatest benefits at this point.