Indian health care providers are set to splash over $1 billion on IT products and services in 2014, a huge 5% jump from last year’s spending.

The estimates come from research firm Gartner, who said today at its annual symposium in Barcelona that $300m alone will be spent in Indian health care IT services, with $300m of the overall $1.1bn going into the sector.

Other IT-related divisions that the $1.1bn will be poured into will be hospital systems, ambulatory services, internal services, software, data centres and telecoms services.

"India has a new government, and the Ministry of Health will closely examine ways to deliver cost effective healthcare across the country. Delivering wide access to healthcare in an affordable manner will be a top priority for the wider public healthcare system," said Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner.

"The organised private healthcare sector will continue its expansion across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as well as niche sectors like maternity and child health. We expect emphasis on eHealth, mobile health, telemedicine, public private partnership and leveraging innovative delivery models."

Internal Services will get the highest growth rate amongst the spending categories – forecast to be 18% in 2014. Internal services refer to salaries and benefits paid to the information services staff of an organisation