Strong Leadership is Key to Embracing Digital Transformation in Healthcare

Healthcare is constantly evolving due to various issues: declining profit margins, pricing pressures, geopolitical forces, and stringent regulatory and legislative requirements. Such changes demand strong leaders who can provide clear direction and an effective roadmap to the digital transformation that will induce the next wave of innovation, claims GlobalData.
 
A majority (69%) of the healthcare industry professionals who participated in the GlobalData’s survey, “Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry – 2022,”  said they consider strong leadership a crucial factor in delivering a successful digital transformation. 
 
“Digital transformation is not only about implementing technologies, but also about empowering people to work in new ways, encouraging collaboration, and building a constant culture of change,” said Urte Jakimaviciute, GlobalData’s senior director of Market Research. “Digital transformation relies on leaders that can activate the process. Identifying and attracting skilful employees, preparing the current workforce for the digitalized business environment, ensuring alignment and collaboration with different business units and removing organizational silos to ensure a smooth and cost-efficient transformation are among the issues that leaders need to address.”
 
Strong leadership has emerged as the most important factor for successful digital transformation since GlobalData launched this yearly survey in 2018 to track healthcare’s digital transformation efforts. Building a consistent culture of change—which was rated as the second most important prerequisite for a successful digital transformation between 2018-2021—slipped to the third position and was replaced by the need for adequate collaboration between IT and business lines.
 
“Digital transformation is not a one-off process. The success in embracing new technologies highly depends on cooperation, coordination, and knowledge sharing. To ensure a successful digital transformation, all teams should work together to better understand the priorities and identify risks that need to be addressed,” Jakimaviciute said. “While collaboration between IT and business is likely one of the most important success factors, it is still largely absent in many organizations. Historically IT has been siloed in many organizations, but as companies are becoming more and more digital, it is a must to reconnect and synchronize the IT with the rest of the business units. Having strong leadership can help to bridge this gap.”