In Perot's most recently available results, for the quarter ending Sept. 30, 2008, the company reported revenue of $711 million, about 46 percent of which, or $330 million, was in the health-care group. In an interview with Channelweb.com, Perot Healthcare leaders detailed why an international presence is such a big part of Perot Healthcare's growth plans.

"We've had a lot of aggressive development," said George Yurek, chief strategy officer for Perot Systems Healthcare. "International is one of the large priorities. While 96 to 97 percent of the business is domestic, we do have a footprint in the U.K., an emerging footprint in the Middle East and we're developing our business in Canada, Mexico, India and China."

Yurek and Harry Greenspun, Perot's executive vice president and chief medical officer of the health-care group, said Perot's goal is to grow the international piece of its overall health-care business from 4 percent to 10 percent in five years. The company has been working to nurture its U.K. and Middle Eastern bases, especially. Among recent highlights, Perot landed a contract to pilotan open-source clinical and health-care information management system in Jordan.

"One common theme is reform. Every geography is open to having private investment," Yurek said. "The Chinese government, for example, recently announced a stimulus [plan] for health care and is doing a lot to incent private companies to come in and build hospital infrastructure. Then there's the same electronic medical records theme that's not exactly exclusive to the United States. There's a high degree of interest."

When health-care IT infrastructure does get up to speed in many developing nations, Yurek and Greenspun said, it will keep pace with many U.S. hospitals and other facilities -- maybe even outpace them. The reason, Greenspun suggested, is essentially starting from scratch with 21st century health-care IT developments as building blocks.

"Around the world, Western medicine has been viewed as a model to follow," Greenspun said. "A lot of these countries are from a quasi-IT greenfield start and are going to jump very far ahead of many of our own hospitals. They're not weighed down with legacy systems."