Wars do not need to reach a hospital campus in Hyderabad or a delivery center in Bengaluru to change the way U.S. healthcare technology companies operate. Sometimes the first signs appear elsewhere: in oil prices, in cyber alerts, in delayed budgets, in boardroom language suddenly shifting from growth to resilience.
That is why the question now being asked across the industry is both simple and serious: will U.S. healthcare IT companies and their India-based GCCs be affected by the war?
The most truthful answer is this: yes, but mostly indirectly—and not uniformly. The bigger risk is not that healthcare IT work in India suddenly stops. The bigger risk is that a prolonged conflict raises energy costs, weakens currencies, pressures U.S. enterprise spending, and increases cyber threats, all while forcing companies to tighten priorities around business continuity, security, and productivity. Reuters reported this week that the war-driven disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has helped push oil sharply higher, with Brent and WTI up more than 40% in March and global supply routes under stress.
For India, that matters immediately. Reuters reported that the rupee hit a record low as oil surged, underscoring how exposed the country remains to imported-energy shocks. India also said it was ready to support oil markets after the IEA agreed to a record emergency release, highlighting the seriousness of the supply disruption. Higher energy prices do not only affect transport or factories; they flow into operating costs, inflation expectations, and broader business sentiment across sectors, including technology services and GCC operations.
The war may be far from India’s tech corridors, but the cost shock is not.
Still, healthcare IT is not like discretionary consumer software. Many of the systems U.S. healthcare companies run from India are tied to claims processing, revenue-cycle operations, payer workflows, provider platforms, cloud engineering, interoperability, cybersecurity, analytics, compliance, and mission-critical support. These are not the easiest budgets to cut in a sector where uptime, regulation, patient operations, and cost control matter every day. That does not make healthcare immune, but it does make it more resilient than many other verticals. This resilience is an inference from the essential nature of healthcare operations and from how companies continue expanding healthcare-linked capability centers in India.
The India story, in fact, has not been one of retreat. Reuters reported in 2024 that Sanofi planned to invest 400 million euros in its India global capacity centre by the end of the decade and more than double its workforce over two years. Reuters also reported that Carl Zeiss opened a technology-focused GCC in India with software, cloud, cybersecurity, and medical-technology support functions. These are not isolated back offices; they are strategic operating centers.
That distinction is important because GCCs have changed. They are no longer merely labor-arbitrage hubs. Increasingly, they are embedded into product engineering, platform operations, data services, AI enablement, and enterprise risk management. In healthcare IT, that means India teams often sit close to systems that U.S. clients cannot afford to have fail. In a fragile geopolitical environment, that can actually increase India’s strategic importance—provided delivery remains secure and reliable. This is an inference based on the documented expansion of tech-focused and healthcare-linked GCC capabilities in India.
But resilience should not be confused with immunity. Reuters reported in January that Indian top IT firms were headed for another tepid quarter because of weak U.S. demand and cautious client spending. Reuters also reported in February that India’s technology sector is still expected to surpass $300 billion in revenue in the current fiscal year, even as AI disruption and global uncertainty challenge traditional software business models. That combination—growth with nervousness—is exactly the environment many healthcare IT players now face.
This is a sector that may keep growing while becoming more selective, more security-conscious, and far less tolerant of low-value spend.
For U.S. healthcare IT companies, the spending picture could split in two directions at once. Non-essential programs, long-horizon experiments, and discretionary transformation work may slow if clients become cautious. At the same time, demand may strengthen for automation, AI-led productivity, cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, and cost-takeout programs. Reuters reported that TCS saw AI-driven demand help growth in a weak quarter, with North America growing for the first time in two years. That does not prove every healthcare IT firm will benefit, but it does suggest that AI-linked spending is not disappearing—it is becoming more targeted.
Cyber risk is where the war may become most visible for healthcare technology. Reuters reported this week that Iran-linked hackers claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on U.S. medical-device maker Stryker, and a follow-up report said the company faced disruptions to orders, manufacturing, and shipments. Stryker said patient-related services and connected medical devices were unaffected, but the incident shows how quickly geopolitical tension can spill into healthcare-adjacent technology infrastructure.
That is not a small detail. Healthcare organizations are already among the most sensitive cyber targets in the world because the cost of interruption is so high. In a conflict environment, cyber defense stops being a back-office control and becomes part of business continuity itself. For India-based GCCs and offshore teams supporting U.S. healthcare companies, that raises the value of security operations, threat monitoring, cloud hardening, identity controls, backup recovery, and incident response readiness. The Stryker incident does not mean all healthcare IT operations are under immediate threat, but it is a real example of why war changes technology priorities.
In healthcare technology, resilience is not an abstract word. It is the difference between delay and disruption.
So will GCCs in India be “affected”? Yes—but probably not in the simplistic way many fear. The most likely near-term effects are indirect: tighter executive scrutiny on spending, stronger focus on mission-critical work, higher sensitivity to cost and productivity, more demand for AI-backed efficiency, and a sharper emphasis on cyber resilience. Companies dependent on broad, discretionary digital programs could feel pressure. Teams tied to essential healthcare workflows, compliance, security, claims, clinical data infrastructure, and operational continuity are more likely to remain relevant. That sector split is an inference, but it is grounded in the current pattern of U.S. tech caution and the mission-critical nature of healthcare operations.
There is also a strategic paradox here. A prolonged war can hurt sentiment and raise costs, but it can also make India more important to U.S. healthcare companies looking for scalable delivery, lower operating costs, round-the-clock support, and deep engineering talent. When leadership teams are told to preserve margins without compromising service, GCCs often become part of the answer rather than part of the problem. Reuters’ reporting on continued tech-sector growth in India and expansion of global centers supports that broader direction, even if near-term volatility remains real.
The deeper change may be philosophical. Before a crisis, a GCC can be viewed as an efficiency center. During a crisis, it is tested as a resilience center. That is a much higher standard. It requires secure delivery, mature governance, cross-site continuity planning, domain expertise, and the ability to keep business-critical systems running while the outside world gets noisier.
That is where this war is likely to leave its mark on U.S. healthcare IT and India-based GCCs—not by erasing them, but by redefining what they are expected to prove.
And in that test, India may matter even more than before.