Monthly newsletter March 2021
A third Covid-19 wave occupies the health care sector as we all long for a spring that will bring us both hope and sunshine.
The pandemic affects our industry in so many ways. During the first waves of Covid a few pilots were halted due to the overwhelming burden on the health providers. The new normal is starting to stabilise, and FRISQ's ongoing projects continue to run as planned or better.
Better still, care staff who have had access to FRISQ Care are spreading the gospel of its benefits and many say outright that FRISQ Care has transformed the way they work. Initiated commercial innovation and cooperative projects continue to depend heavily on FRISQ Care and we have in several instances been asked to increase our involvement. When asked to use and compare both FRISQ Care and the previous process, one nurse exclaimed: “Forget that I do one more enrolment the old way when I have access to FRISQ!”.
The pandemic also affects our commercial trajectory. While long-term decisions in the healthcare sectors are pushed aside by a necessary focus on near term priorities, the underlying interest in continuing digitalisation is intact. Expectations from professionals is an increasingly important driving force behind the continued digitalisation of health services. And recent market reports confirm our sense that patients’ expectations also play an increasingly larger role in boosting the demand for more easily accessible advice and digital care options.
The projections for the global healthcare IT market now circles around 15 % annual growth (CAGR). It is becoming increasingly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has a direct and significant impact on the growth of healthcare IT through the increased demand for remote access and storage of data. This adds to still valid factors such as the growing burden of chronic diseases and hence the need to save time, labour, and space, on one side, and rising improvements in network infrastructure as well as technological advancements, on the other. No wonder that there is broad political backing of initiatives to speed up the digitalisation of healthcare.
The needs are enormous, while the implementation challenges are complex in the current environment. It will prove crucial to be an experienced, well-compliant provider of running implementations that meet high functionality demands when more decision makers will turn their heads towards the next steps in the digitalisation of healthcare processes.
George Thaw,
CEO, FRISQ