India healthcare players may see 20-25% increase in their digital spend: Survey

India’s leading healthcare players are expected to increase their spending on digital initiatives by 20%–25% over the next 2–3 years as innovation becomes central to their strategic priorities, the findings of a just released EY-CII HealthTech Survey 2025 says. The remainder of the IT budget of healthcare players will continue to support technology upgrades, cybersecurity, and data storage, the survey results point out.

According to the survey, 45% of providers spend more than 2% of their revenue on IT. Another 45% spend 0.5%–1% of their revenue, while 10% spent 1%–2%. Providers actively pursuing digital transformation have increased their IT budgets over the past 2–3 years, aligning with future plans to unify group-level systems, enable data consistency, and implement innovative solutions across clinical and non-clinical functions, it points out.

The findings of the Survey published in CII-EY report titled “Unleashing digital momentum to shape the future of healthcare Enabling automation to enforcing transformation” says innovation has emerged as a key differentiator among digitally mature healthcare systems. In the survey, 50% of providers report allocating 20%–50% of their IT budget to digital innovation, while roughly one fourth spent less than 20% and another one-fourth spent over 50% on initiatives addressing core challenges.

More than half (60%) of healthcare service providers in the EY-CII HealthTech Survey identify capability building and upskilling IT teams as a major tech-related challenge at present, underscoring the need for enhanced skills within their workforce. While half the providers (50%) indicate challenges in bringing data together and driving adoption of business intelligence (BI) tools, hardware and network infrastructure (20%), as well as data storage and management (20%), are seen as moderately challenging but by a significant portion of respondents (60% for data management). Cybersecurity and data privacy, along with patient engagement platforms, are also perceived as moderate challenges by 30% and 40% of healthcare service providers, respectively. In contrast, AI and GenAI use cases (10%) and business-critical application upgrades (10%) are seen as less pressing issues.

The report suggests that most healthcare providers realise that having a strong team to support digital initiatives along with the ability to generate real time insights will help take informed decisions to make way for implementation of new age technology.