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The Pandemic as a Key Catalyst for Digital Healthcare Transformation

Israel Rodrigo< Israel Rodrigo August 10, 2021

As the world is still fighting outbursts of new COVID variants, most economies globally are signaling a steady recovery to even higher levels than their pre-pandemic situations.  

If there is something we all have learned during this time, regardless of our age, nationality, or social status, is how painfully related healthcare and economy have become. And how dependent we are on healthcare, and how little prepared we were as a society to deal with this situation. 

From a technology point of view, with the exception of R&D efforts, the healthcare industry has traditionally been lagging behind other verticals when it comes to digital transformation. Especially in investing in sophisticated BI tools, optimization of business processes, and full utilization of their Big Data and cloud computing for commercial purposes. 

Solving Inefficiencies in Healthcare

Clearly, COVID-19 has been a driver and accelerator of health care innovation in 2020, and especially for digital transformation. The pandemic has exposed the inefficiencies between the demand for health care and the supply of staff and other medical resources. It has forced all stakeholders in the value chain of health systems across all economies into rethinking their business models about how the adoption of technology is a critical matter to help close that gap, monetize their efforts, and prepare for the future. 

By talking to healthcare industry leaders, we are seeing that as a result, many digital healthcare transformation initiatives around commercial excellence that have been postponed for years are advancing to the forefront. In most industries, cloud computing technology already has a strong footprint and has been seen as a solution to significantly improve IT infrastructure and reduce costs.

That’s due to its ability to process and deliver data in an efficient, collaborative manner and analyze data to deliver meaningful information. Healthcare organizations are transitioning to IT systems powered by cloud computing and data analytics tools to enable real-time, smart digital health services.  

Connecting Providers with Consumers 

During this time, as healthcare consumers, we have seen how our health is now a top priority. We have understood our needs and goals when it comes to our well-being, and our focus has shifted to prevention and wellness from treatment and sick care. We are now in control. 

To draw an analogy, the same reasoning applies to the relationship between provider and customer. When talking to Vendavo’s healthcare customers, they value how our cloud-based solutions are enabling them to be nimbler and implement a more decentralized approach to commercial excellence.

One good example is our ability to help them in maximizing revenues and optimizing customer experience by enabling a marketplace or partner portals with our CPQ solution. Within it, they gain have real-time, proactive, easy-to-use, and remote access to data, storage, integrated applications, or infrastructure services.  

They can, for example, leverage analytics and process best practices in an end-to-end contracting and quoting process. The complexity of negotiating contracts and the variety of data needed to evaluate them means healthcare companies need to supplement available data with software tools to evaluate contractual agreements, pricing terms and conditions, and so on in the context of executing an integrated marketing strategy.

They are investing in having a way of evaluating and streamlining business efficiency by improving data cleanliness and data exchange. And at the same time, being easy to deal with and interact with. 

Technology as a Digital Healthcare Transformation Tool

The most mature customers with the best solutions each share a common platform across their company. They use it to not only help to model and predict profitability for different contracting scenarios; they also are able to provide the right context when interacting in the negotiation process for an effective customer experience.

This drives a healthy pipeline and informs the allocation of the proper sales force and marketing programs (rebates, promotions, direct-to-consumer marketing programs, et cetera).

In addition to helping determine proper channel incentives, leveraging data can help companies refine the relationship between effective business processes and sales effort. This can give companies a better understanding of the sales force activity and marketing investment required to excel at executing their go-to-market strategy. 

Still, a software solution alone will not fix a healthcare company’s commercial excellence and pricing pain points. It needs to be part of a comprehensive transformational framework that can help determine what the company’s go-to-market strategy should be, enables the agility to decide when it should change, and then allows it to adjust different programs, and provides insights into when it should supplement this strategy with salesforce and marketing investments to ultimately improve the overall customer experience. 


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