Springboard Research has announced results from its latest research on IT adoption in the healthcare industry in Asia.  Springboard has found that the emerging markets in Asia (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) are accounting for an increasing percentage of the IT spending in the healthcare industry across Asia.

Springboard estimates that emerging markets account for 59% of the $3.4 billion in healthcare IT spending in Asia (excluding Japan) in 2007, with this share expected to increase to 64% of spending by 2010.

“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 Jonathan Silber, research manager for Springboard Research.  “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.”

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.  61% of the 2007 spending was on hardware and this is expected to continue relatively steady, dropping slowly to 57% 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% between 2006 and 2010.