Moving on from my last post which covered the Rotman Talks “Managing Healthcare” webinar panel, last month I also attended a presentation in the ongoing Health Care Summit Series webcast from Deloitte Life Sciences & Health Care group. It was here that Deloitte discussed the latest survey of global health systems leaders in its 2025 Global Health Care Outlookwhich covered responses from Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom and USA.
As in the Rotman discussion on “Managing AI in Healthcare” once again there is no escaping it, in the Deloitte piece on March 25th, the first of three focus areas for trends impacting healthcare organizations was Digital Transformation which includes the uptick in adoption of virtual health platforms and the use of Generative AI. Of concern in this digital path is the issue of cyber attacks where almost 80 percent of executives see this as the top action area to enhance cyber security.
No surprise, given that on a number of global webinar sessions I’ve attended over the last few years health care sector professionals express that patients are worried about how private and secure their personal health records are in shared databases. This connects with another trend identified in the survey – meeting and exceeding patient expectations, to which UK Health Care sector leader Sara Siegel at Deloitte Global spoke.
Highlighting ways to improve patient experience, Siegel endorsed that when patients engage in health systems they be encouraged to find personal agency to take charge of their own data; something I leaned into over a decade ago while encountering a health incident. If I hadn’t captured information in fast paced medical visits I would have been lost. Things improved when I came prepared with written questions, took notes and asked for data printouts where available.
Sticking with the theme of patient experience, something that has been of recurring mention ever since the 2020 pandemic is the access to healthcare, and in this Deloitte survey there is the call to “evaluate alternative sites of care”. One of the cute terms Siegel used by the UK’s NHS was “virtual wards”, in other words “hospital at home”. Other alternatives include on-line virtual care or tele-med which of course became more accepted during the height of the pandemic.
With this era of digital transformation ramping up, there are challenges. Where workforce talent retention, and the speed and cost of adoption can also meet resistance or lack of trust, one of the key points I took away from this Deloitte session was made by both Minni Sarkka-Hietala,Health Care sector leader for North and South Europe and Jay Bhatt, Managing Director, US Center for Health Solutions – the measurement of outcomes of digital technology solutions.
Apart from investing in tech support, education and upskilling for healthcare employees who are also experiencing burn out, there is the question of measuring how effective technology tools are in removing the burden of admin work. When it comes to patient experience, outcome measurements also apply, and as Jay Bhatt said that with designing tech solutions, health organizations should “co-create the tools with end user consumers who are the patients.
If one other phrase alerted my attention in this webcast it came from Minni Sarkka-Hietala who said “healthcare is global”, meaning the systems. Minni noted for example that a health system in the UK could have medical tech support coming from India. Meanwhile looking at other global realities, as cited in the Deloitte survey: “In Indonesia, 80% of health care facilities are “untouched by digital technology,” and 270 million patient records exist only on paper.” Yet Indonesia is apparently on the case with its Blueprint of Digital Health Transformation Strategy.
So as this digital transformation slowly but surely sneaks up on us, whether from behind the digital curtain in a doctor’s office or evidenced right in front of us o an app, if we’re in pain and need of care while we might not be thinking about the tech terminology as Generative AI or Agentic AI but we should know it’s in or out there and as the Deloitte survey mirrors Rotman’s talks, “most health system executives agree that more AI regulations are needed” and patients should agree.
