It not only President Barack Obama, who will be celebrating the passage of the US healthcare reforms Bill by the US House of Representatives. In fact Indian IT companies are also extremely happy as the bill, apart from offering to establish Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for all Americans by 2014, will also, apparently, open up a $20 billion market opportunity for Indian IT services firms like Infosys, Wipro, TCS.

The plan by Obama offers to apportion $150 billion to healthcare. Out of this, almost $20 billion is proposed for healthcare IT alone, most of which is expected to be spent on EHRs.

Speculations say that Indian IT firms will participate in EHR implementations, upgradation, integration of databases and inter-operability and will also have the option to construct solutions to assist the US healthcare industry to prevent leakages and reduce costs and waste.

S Gopalakrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys Technologies, said, "This is a huge opportunity for the industry and good news for Indian IT services companies that invest heavily in the healthcare domain."

Rajiv Shah, Sr. VP, Healthcare Services SBU (strategic business unit), Wipro Technologies said, "This allocation, as part of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is opening up the healthcare IT market like never before. It is bringing in a host of opportunities for EHR vendors, healthcare IT service providers and hospital systems."

Apart from this, the bill also brings along with it new chances for service providers to participate more closely with EHR vendors which can open up more strategic partnerships and alliances going forward.

The aim of the ARRA is to aid hospitals in maintaining digital record of patients and the hospital can share the EHR with the next provider, if a patient decides to change his or her healthcare provider, ensuring the portability of the EHRs.

Due to this reason, IT vendors are required playing an enormous role in making sure that the EHR developed by one provider is compatible with the IT systems used by another.