A total of 58% healthcare industry professionals globally believe that digital transformation initiatives—involving the implementation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, application programming interfaces (API) and others—would be slowed down due to inflation and rising costs, according to a survey by GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

The survey, which was published in GlobalData’s latest report, ‘Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry – 2022 Edition’, reveals that 63% of healthcare and pharmaceutical industry professionals in North America expected a disruption to digitalization initiatives in their business units due to inflation. The same opinion was expressed by 55% of industry professionals in Europe and 47% in the Asia-Pacific region.

Elton Kwok, Market Research Manager of Pharma at GlobalData, comments: “Rising costs of labor and raw materials has become a dominant topic of 2022. Inflation is expected to put some pressure on the profit growth of pharma businesses, resulting in reduced investment activities that may impact digital transformation projects. Digitalization requires funding, time and talent; inflation and costs pressures may force companies to scale back focus and investment in these projects.”

However, more than 20% of respondents in the survey believed that inflation may actually serve as a catalyst for digital transformation efforts, most likely due to technologies’ ability to drive cost reduction.

Kwok concludes: “The benefits and advantages introduced by emerging technologies are still attractive to some companies, though they require a significant amount of time, labour and costs.”