Atul Chhabra | Source | Founding Principal at DigXchange

The world of healthcare and life sciences is undergoing a radical transformation driven by a combination of innovative digital technologies, cloud platforms and the demands of a constantly evolving global marketplace. Healthcare services have typically lagged behind other industries in undertaking the sweeping changes needed to create a fully integrated digital ecosystem. But the sudden and unceasing demands of the COVID-19 pandemic have spurred a wave of digital innovation that promises to reshape the future of healthcare for good, with a multitude of benefits for both patients and providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the face of nearly every part of our global society. In the face of tragedy and challenge, people and businesses have found new ways to persevere, adapt, and move forward. With the healthcare industry finding itself squarely in the middle of the storm during the pandemic, it only makes sense that this sector has seen some of the most significant resulting changes. Certainly, digital transformation is not a new concept for the healthcare community, but by most accounts its progress in achieving the intended ‘transformation’ would be considered glacially slow by nearly any measure. This is particularly concerning when we consider that effective digital transformation is not just a means of improving efficiency, customer experience or profits. Rather, in this environment it can directly improve patient outcomes and reduce loss of life. In this sense, the pandemic has been a critical accelerator that has now placed digital transformation front-and-center. According to research by Dell Technologies, 84 percent of healthcare executives have relied on data and intelligent technologies for new insights during the pandemic. In this article, we’ll consider various ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in the healthcare industry and the five key takeaways that can help us build a better future.

As the world begins a tentative look toward the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that some trends that became central in the last year are here to stay, and others have dramatically accelerated. In the case of digital transformation, both points are true. The real challenge for enterprises today is to unlock the value of digital transformation. The key term here is ‘transformation’, which is why Gartner specifically focuses on this as a process that unlocks new opportunities, efficiencies and potentials for growth. Merely supplanting an analog process with a digital one does not achieve transformation unless the new digital process brings these added benefits that move the enterprise in a fundamentally new direction.