Index Insider: In Healthcare, Digital Transformation Starts with Resources

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CHALLENGES IN HEALTHCARE

ISG recently completed a study on digital transformation in the Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical as a special topic in our Buyer Behavior research program. Today, we’re looking at just the Healthcare data from that study.

In the survey, we ask Healthcare organizations to identify the top three challenges they face in their digital transformation and to what extent they are meeting their digital transformation goals. We found that companies that are not achieving their digital goals face different challenges than companies that are (see Data Watch).

For organizations that are not achieving their goals, staff availability and limited funding are the top two most common challenges. These tend to be indicators of transformation programs that have not formulated strategies with corresponding business cases and have not yet secured funding. Both these challenges are associated with not having started and not knowing where to start or who will do the work. Because these problems can be accelerated with the help of digital transformation partners, it can be a powerful move to leverage third parties to get past the initial cost and talent gaps.

Healthcare companies that are achieving their goals say they face even more significant hurdles, including change management, regulatory compliance and technology integration. Once an organization gets past the hurdles of starting, they face the more critical impediments to transformation itself: the existing technical environment, legal constraints and organizational change management. None of these can be ignored, and all of them require leadership from the business working alongside IT.

The trends in Healthcare are broadly consistent with what we’ve seen in smart manufacturing and cloud adoption surveys. Once digital transformation is underway, change management looms large, while technical solutions become manageable.

DATA WATCH