The healthcare CIO: Leading the transformation

Kal Patel, managing director of digital health at Flex, explains how CIOs in healthcare must lead digital transformation

Across industries, CIOs are being called upon to lead a dramatic shift into digitisation.

Once focused on internal IT systems such as email and CRMs, CIOs are now heading digital transformation and broader company strategy. In healthcare and life sciences, CIOs are leading these efforts in one of the most consequential and challenging sectors.

Today, consumer tech has become a key driver of competition amongst pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers. For instance, the number of apps developed by pharma companies more than tripled from 305 in 2013 to 988 in 2016, according to research from Deloitte.

And patients are tech-savvy consumers, a group who have come to expect healthcare experiences to be as seamless as Uber. They seek connected medical devices and apps that can help track medication, better manage lifestyles and habits around potential risks, automatically titrate drug dosing, and guide sophisticated treatment plans.

Yet engagement on a handheld touchscreen, built on millions of lines of ones and zeros, is a competitive arena drastically different to pharmaceuticals' traditional bread and butter. Most companies have yet to develop breakthrough apps that their patients just can't live without. Pharma apps generated 5.6 million out of 3.2 billion downloads generated overall by mHealth apps in 2016, Deloitte research found.

To lead in a competitive environment, CIOs must demand more from their applications - define their company's digital strategy and drive the development of tools that effectively deliver on that strategy.

Undoubtedly, any digital transformation strategy will centre on data. In healthcare, we have access to more data than at any point in history - medical records, lifestyle, biometrics and genetics, to name a few. For a patient, doctor or healthcare provider, better integration and utilisation of this data could provide potential benefits.

Yet the challenge of data integration in healthcare is more significant than just about any other industry. Much of this data is largely walled off, siloed in medical records, disease management programs, payers, clinical trial systems and more; protected by immense barriers built from regulations and stringent data management protocols.

CIOs will not only need to optimise their own strategy, but partner with other providers and third-party entities to create interoperable and open systems. Only through partnership can companies establish shared data management protocols that break down barriers preventing the most innovative and beneficial applications from being developed. However, success in this effort is only the surface of the challenge.

With big data comes big responsibility. The CIO must not only drive a healthcare company's digital strategy, but evolve its overall security and compliance culture. Under new regulations like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), failure to protect data, or general non-compliance, can now lead to a penalty equivalent to 4 per cent of a company's global revenue.

Beyond the privacy requirements, there are also stringent security challenges and regulatory hurdles. The typical product lifecycle of a molecule is ten to fifteen years. Software regulated as a medical device, in stark contrast to a pharma company's traditional products, must be updated every few months or even weeks.

From a regulatory compliance perspective, it is challenging to create harmony across these varied development and regulatory submission timelines, including details on requirements, design, testing, processes and articles used in the development, every time an update takes place.

As with interoperable and open systems, the solution to tackling the challenges associated with deploying digital health solutions lies in collaboration. By partnering with tech experts on the infrastructure for hosting, deploying and maintaining digital health apps, devices and algorithms, CIOs can focus their team's time and creativity on true differentiation - innovation based on each company's fundamental strengths.