The goal of any hospital or healthcare provider is their patients’ health and wellbeing. When it comes to embracing new technologies, it’s not about staying on the cutting edge or decreasing cost as much as it’s about improving patient care, services and experiences that help them recover.
“Hospitals want to be innovative,” said Cheryl Rodenfels, CTO of Americas Healthcare at Nutanix. “They want to go fast. They want to do cool things.”
But they stall when it comes to embracing new technologies, especially compared to other sectors such as the financial industry.
“They lag behind because they don't want to go first,” she said. “Healthcare just wants to move the needle, which can hold them back from taking a leap ahead.”
Rodenfels, a former CIO and IT leader inside a variety of healthcare providers, spent the past year closely studying the steps it takes to build a reliable IT ecosystem. She said healthcare organizations integrate hundreds of applications, so IT decision makers must carefully weigh the impact of implementing new technologies. Reliability, security and scalability are essential.
“Most hospitals take a measured approach,” she said. “They start with their strategy then evaluate the risks.”
Confronted with the challenges of COVID-19, healthcare providers know their technology systems must be resilient and quickly adaptable. More than 70% of global IT leaders who responded to the 2020 Enterprise Cloud Index survey said COVID-19 has caused IT to be viewed more strategically within their organization. They say that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation that is likely to shape the future of healthcare.
“While IT leaders agree that hybrid cloud is a key enabler of this transformation, healthcare organization need to identity IT solutions to help them on the journey, ” said Rodenfels.