A crisis, such as the current pandemic, is said to put a laser sharp focus on what really matters.
For the healthcare and life sciences sector this means using digital technologies to accelerate innovation and improve the customer experience as the market fundamentally moves to a value-based model.
But the sector was already under pressure. In their recent report “2020 Global Health Care Outlook”, Deloitte shows how a combination of expanding and aging populations, increased proliferation of chronic conditions, investment in MedTech, rising labour costs and staff shortages have all driven the industry to value-based healthcare market models in order to cope.
New strategies for growth in the sector all require “more” digital
To stay competitive and to seize new collaboration opportunities, organisations have begun to implement new digital strategies, including population health management, virtual and digital healthcare and health data management.
Digital transformation is also needed to address sector priorities such as revenue growth, innovation acceleration and improvements in customer and patient experience across healthcare eco-systems globally.
Network infrastructure is at the core of that digital transformation, connecting office locations, production sites, research facilities, biotech labs, distribution centres and points of sale with private data centres, specialised cloud providers and hyper scalers. Keeping it secure and enabling this eco-system to interact with patients across the globe means that networks need to change to become more agile and flexible while retaining scalability and resilience; and keeping some necessary legacy too.
Acceleration of network transformation is crucial for success
As a result of the pandemic the pace of digital network transformation has ramped up in three main areas. First, the general pressure on healthcare systems put scalability and capacity to the ultimate test. Second, the race for treatments and vaccines has put a focus on speed of innovation while staying compliant. Third, the big move to the home office shifted technology topology and the way people work.
As a result, you as IT decision makers in the healthcare and life sciences sector face no small task.
- To drive the right business outcomes, you must work to create networks for research and development that are ready to leverage artificial intelligence and embrace edge computing as well as the cloud, while safeguarding intellectual property.
- You’ll need to provide infrastructure that drives smart production and logistics through embracing industry 4.0 and IoT securely, optimising existing pharma and medical manufacturing and new biotechnology-based treatments.
- You have to support multichannel technology and portals to drive better digital and virtual patient engagement in healthcare and for virtual clinical trials with compliant handling of patient and medical data.
- Last, but not least, you need to stretch your networks beyond the office and corporate sites to the living places of all your employees as they work from home in a safer and healthier environment during the pandemic.
Is tech really enough to propel you ahead?
On the upside, if you happen to be an IT decision maker feeling the pressure, then fast paced technology advances put most of the necessary tools at your disposal. You can create an agile network infrastructure to enable these tasks and drive your company’s digital transformation roadmap.
But it takes more than tech to shape a global network and technology alone is not the answer.
For digital transformation to be truly successful, infrastructure with the right security, integration, service and management is required. We have a wealth of experience in network transformations we’ve delivered globally, many of those in the Healthcare and Life Sciences sector.
During the pandemic, we helped customers across the HLS sector extend bandwidth for homeworking. We supported shifting their call centres to remote agent capabilities to ensure CRM continuity. And we drove their network evolution towards cloud and software defined networks even during lockdowns and limitations to keep them transform at pace.
We manage multiple technologies and legacy systems to create a single, secure global network infrastructure for your business. We can easily integrate with the collaboration applications, data and third-party cloud providers you need globally. And our end-to-end management simplifies operations for you while improving user experience for your team and your customers.
Let’s discuss how we can accelerate your digital transformation with the right infrastructure and tap into our knowledge and expertise to drive your business outcomes!
Get in touch or read ‘Shape your future infrastructure: A proposal’ for more detailed information on how we can guide your transformation
