77% of healthcare leaders believe they need to go digital to succeed: Microsoft

• Only 25% have a full digital strategy in place today; 30% have limited or no strategy
• Must constantly leverage on the opportunity to embed technology into the care continuum

BUSINESS leaders in Asia Pacific’s healthcare industry are showing urgency in embracing the 4th Industrial Revolution, where 77% of them believe that they need to transform to a digital business to enable future growth and yet only 25% said that they have a full digital strategy in place today.

These are some of the key findings of the Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Survey to understand how business leaders in the healthcare sector are embracing the digital era.

The study surveyed 1,494 business leaders from Asia Pacific working in organisations with more than 250 employees from 13 Asia Pacific markets: Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

All respondents were pre-qualified as being involved in shaping their organisations’ digital strategy. This included 247 healthcare leaders from Asia Pacific.

Technology advancements have ushered in the 4th Industrial Revolution, where cutting-edge technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics, and mixed reality that are powered by cloud computing are creating limitless possibilities in transforming the way people work, live and play.

This revolution, compounded by on-going challenges faced by the healthcare industry, such as the evolving healthcare needs due to changing demographics, rise of chronic diseases, shortage of caregivers and cost of quality healthcare, is ushering societal and economic changes at an unprecedented pace.

However, the 4th Industrial Revolution also has the potential to be truly game-changing for the healthcare industry.

Taken together, the potential for merging physical, digital and biological systems can enable the healthcare industry to achieve its aspirations.

Even as majority of business leaders are aware of the urgent need to transform digitally to address the changing business climate, the study found that the transformation journey for most organisations in Asia Pacific is still at its infancy.

In fact, only 25% of healthcare leaders indicated that they have a full digital transformation strategy in place, and 45% are in progress with specific digital transformation initiatives for selected parts of their organisation. Thirty percent still have very limited or no strategy in place.

Gabe Rijpma, senior director, Health and Social Services, Asia, Microsoft, said: “The Microsoft Asia Digital Transformation Study has shown that Asia Pacific’s healthcare industry has started to act on the need for digital transformation to address the challenges and opportunities of the 4th Industrial Revolution in the region.

“However, healthcare providers are not acting fast enough in capitalising the value of latent data to transform a reactive ‘sick care system’ into a proactive one that manages individual and population health more effectively and at a lower cost. We urge all business leaders in this space to digitally transform themselves amidst changing demands externally and internally, to stay relevant.

“At Microsoft, we believe this involves transformation in four key pillars – empowering care teams, engaging patients, optimising clinical and operational effectiveness and transforming the care continuum. Underlining these four pillars are the use of data and cloud, which will further accelerate the aspirations of the healthcare industry.”

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