A Dose of Tech

Health care and life sciences companies are using artificial and machine intelligence for better insights and improved treatment since the Covid outbreak

- HARICHANDAN ARAKALI

Change is constant and the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the need for it in the health care and life sciences industry. From hospitals and clinics to drug discovery companies, enterprises have turned to their technology services partners to help them deal with the repercussions of Covid-19. And information technology (IT) service providers have responded with solutions spanning remote connections and innovating new diagnostics equipment to artificial intelligence (AI)-based data analyses.

“The coronavirus has brought a new future into sharp focus. While health care and life sciences organisations still face the same challenges as before, the scale, nature and pace of change have accelerated,” says Sairamkumar Jayaraman, head of delivery for health care and life sciences at Cognizant Technology Solutions.

For life sciences, this primarily centres around virtualising processes—replicating online, current physical processes—to meet today’s challenges while adapting to the ‘new normal’. This includes processes for clinical trials to go ahead, physician engagement, manufacturing operations, scaling diagnostics, accelerating the development of therapeutics such as anti-virals, vaccines,monoclonal antibodies and so on.

For the health care vertical, it is about virtualising care—for administration and delivery—and enabling a unified experience. This will improve access, affordability and quality with more efficiency at lower cost, Jayaraman says.