The healthcare industry is undergoing constant changes resulting from a range of issues from declining profit margins to stringent regulatory and legislative requirements. Against this backdrop, strong leaders, who can provide clear directions and an effective roadmap, are essential to a complete digital transformation process and ride the next wave of innovation, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Majority (69%) of the healthcare industry professionals who participated in the GlobalData’s latest survey, “Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry – 2022,”  revealed that they consider strong leadership as a crucial factor in delivering a successful digital transformation.

Urte Jakimaviciute, Senior Director of Market Research at GlobalData, comments: “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. 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 tracking digital transformation efforts in the healthcare sector in 2018. Building a consistent culture of change – which was rated as the second most important prerequisite for a successful digital transformation between 2018-2021 – was pushed down to the third position and replaced by the need for adequate collaboration between IT and business lines in 2022.

Jakimaviciute concludes: “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.

“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.”

*Data taken from GlobalData’s “Digital Transformation and Emerging Technology in the Healthcare Industry 2022” survey fielded with n = 114 healthcare industry professionals between 14 September to 10 October 2022.