Tight Belts And Technological Necessity In Critical Sectors

Managing Director of Technology at Health2047 and pioneering expert on digital transformation in the healthcare industry.

You don’t have to be a fortune teller to know that 2023 is going to be all about the economy, with everyone focused on ways to do more with less. Costs are still rising and few organizations can keep pace. Whether it's the fault of policy, politics, poor practices or the pandemic, the fact remains that technology implementation is not accelerating as quickly as we need it. This is becoming a huge impediment to the delivery of services and solutions in industries across the board—most prominently in critical sectors like healthcare.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and serious obstacles present opportunities for meaningful change. Here are some ways that might shape IT strategy in the new year:

Prioritizing Powerful AI

In our data-driven world, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are now employed in just about everything. The sheer power and service solution potential of AI are amazing, as is the level of development activity over the past few years. It has pushed impressively into just about every endeavor, from image generation to drug development, in terms of experiments and functional testing. This indicates that much of what will come to market in 2023 and beyond will have been built and tested in the lab to a previously unimaginable degree and will outperform traditional solutions built and iterated “in the wild.”

But we need to leverage such enhancements to the best effect. For example, in the transportation and mobility space, AI’s spotlight has often been focused on introducing self-driving technology to vehicles for the broad consumer car market. That’s a cool idea! But what gets overlooked is the more productive, immediate and practical use of AI and autonomous mobility to revamp still-foundering supply chains.

If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, it is that supply chains desperately require new capabilities to adapt and move in circumstances where manpower is outstripped by demands for delivering services and goods. This presents a ripe opportunity for a new class of highly targeted autonomous transportation technologies and solutions. There probably isn’t anyone on Earth who really needs their own personal robocar right this moment. But there are thousands of shipping ports and transit hubs globally that could sure use fleets of automated trucks moving things like medicines directly where they need to go—STAT!

And lest we forget that everyone must do more with less, recent fuel cost surges and continuing energy transition should certainly drive more use of AI and automation in existing logistics networks to capture greater efficiency in the new year. Such practical goal prioritization should impact 2023’s rollout of new distribution infrastructure and enhanced delivery investment everywhere.

Silicon And The Edge

The use of embedded AI in silicon should also start to expand in 2023. Massive supply chain disruption and the inability to meet demand for microchips across industries over the last 18 months have presented an interesting situation. Stocks of old chip technology have been dwindling, while new fabrication facilities and new designs for custom silicon with enhanced capabilities are proliferating. While it will be a years-long process, this dynamic enables new technology to rise to the forefront.

Customized AI-enabled silicon powers an accelerating internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing confluence that is evolving into a mainstream paradigm. Major public cloud hyperscalers like AWS are making big moves in this arena. Coupled with 5G maturation, 2023 should deliver very powerful compute initiatives, feeding an ever-growing thirst for “smarter” technologies.

What this new age of edge computing delivers is the ability to process information at a speed close to the workload origin, enabling faster, more reliable and more affordable deployment of powerful AI/ML capabilities. In healthcare, for example, this enables desirable things like responsive real-time monitoring via innovative biosensors and wearables or interactive and intuitive digital decision support for clinicians.

Securing The Future

AI and edge innovation can also aid in cybersecurity posture—advanced security technologies deployed at the edge of networks can dramatically reduce digital vulnerabilities automatically and continuously. Sadly, cybersecurity breaches and theft are rife and growing in critical sectors like healthcare at a phenomenal level. Utilizing trending concepts like zero trust show promise, but many organizations—particularly in the healthcare space—don’t possess the skill sets or in-house capabilities to implement a zero trust environment, especially with legacy infrastructure architecture. Yet again, modernizing IT to accommodate advanced automation is really the only hope of defense against the cybersecurity scourge.

In 2023, many industries will be scaling automation to previously unimaginable levels by leveraging cloud power. But this doesn’t mean that organizations will be busy building AI platforms for security or supply chain resilience. In the coming year and beyond, they’ll be using services that already have the ability to deliver the AI applications they need without having to spend time coding or developing themselves.

The cloud has been a game-changer for any industry that requires the use of data (healthcare is no different). Combined with AI and edge capabilities, the game levels up yet again. However, the legacy infrastructure and applications widely used in healthcare today limit capabilities for using these sorts of integrated and transactional systems. With massive losses being seen across the health industry, there’s a danger that investment in modernizing archaic IT and adapting business practices will flounder in 2023.

That would be unfortunate.

The business of healthcare is to deliver care, and the realities of fatigue and damaged workforce dynamics must be faced. The troubling problem on leadership’s shoulders is how to support the organization in the face of labor deficits and rising talent costs while making the business more efficient and lean. The fundamental challenges to critical sectors like healthcare in 2023 are:

• Transformational change in everything from care mechanisms to data security to the supply chain.

• Creating financial sustainability in an ecosystem that is beleaguered and fragmented.

Whatever the state of the economy, a tenacious pursuit of better technology is the best hope for meeting both challenges.

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