What Can Digital Do? Agility, Analytics and Mobility for Life Sciences & Healthcare

Service providers like HCL, which has provided IT and business solutions for the back office, are re-aligning services and investments into digital technologies to serve the life sciences and healthcare industries. HCL’s approach, shared at the recent Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry Analyst Day, is to create seamless processes and secure data access and exchange between members of the industry ecosystem, which all share a focus on the person who is at times seen as the patient, a health plan member, and an industry consumer.  The driving question is “How do we keep every single person at the center of what we do?” asked Sandeep Kishore, HCL’s Corporate VP and Global Head of Life Sciences and Healthcare.  HCL is thinking through the back office out to the front lines that serve the life sciences and health care population.

HCL is identifying and investing in solutions that connect the dots in the life sciences and health care ecosystem, to create more automated and agile systems and data-driven operators. 

For example:

• Connected Digital Health: To help address the cost of care and take advantage of advances and connections in the “Internet of Things,” this solution is designed to create integration across the healthcare supply chain and enable real-time analytics based on machine data with mobile access. Some examples include: proactive and predictive machine maintenance and alert systems to help medical device companies and hospitals reduce maintenance costs, bad experiences for patients, and revenue leakage for clinicians from down/failed devices, etc.
• Consumer Engagement Platform: This platform is designed to be a mobile starting point for consumers, tapping into existing databases from industry, health plans, and providers to show estimated price ranges for overall healthcare expenses, from appointments with specialists to x-rays, treatments, surgeries, and hospital stays. HCL aligns this input with reviews on the quality of services to give consumers estimates on out of pocket expenses versus insurance coverage, and feedback on quality in one place.
• Clinical Platform as a Service: In use with pharmaceutical companies today both directly and with partners, CPaaS is a platform for integrating and standardizing data from multiple sites and sources during clinical trials. The solution has built-in automation and self-learning capabilities for the conversion process with customization as needed to address unique data dictionaries. The point is to reduce the amount of data re-entry, shifting and duplication during drug discovery.

In all of these solutions, there are multiple layers of security, private virtual clouds, encrypted data, and dynamic tokens to restrict access to data and actions.  With all the breaches and sensitivity and laws about data access and use, you can bet that third party providers like HCL will be very focused on tight security measures. Also, to increase its understanding and ability to pilot and use solutions it promotes to clients, HCL has entered a partnership with Johns Hopkins in India to provide health care directly into the community through a projected 500 clinics.

Given this focus on solutions, is HCL turning into a product or software-as-a-service company? No, because the intent is to have a library of plug and play options that HCL can use with a client to address targeted business issues with digitized solutions, with the option of business process services as well.  The trick is, in the complex health care and life sciences environment with lots of quickly advancing and interchangeable parts, to keep it relevant, simple and streamlined, with consistent quality delivery; and focused on the end game: care and experience of the population.