Healthcare organizations have one primary focus: taking care of the health and well-being of their patients. And while there are myriad new therapies, protocols, and treatments coming to market each year, healthcare organizations are hesitant to adopt because the consequences of failure in a human-centric endeavor aren’t just inconvenient, it can be quite literally a matter of life and death.
“For a health services company, a website crash could leave a patient in need of care unable to find an in-network provider or prevent a doctor writing prescriptions from checking medical records to see if the patient had any history of adverse reactions. These higher stakes make it natural – even desirable – for health services companies to develop (and cling to!) patterns of behavior that involve a strong disinclination to tolerate risk,” writes Amanda Evison and Alice Zhou of Strategy&, part of the PwC network, for Forbes.
Despite a natural tendency for healthcare organizations to shy from risk, there’s increasing pressure in the industry to become more innovative, agile, and resilient. Industry leaders like Ramesh Gopalan, President of Global Healthcare and Head of India business for HGS, make the case for implementing vertical integration in their business to ultimately help their clients foster resilience and meet innovation head-on.
“We verticalized our healthcare business, which enables us to invest in healthcare specific resources and capabilities as well as offer a consistent “One HGS” experience to our clients across the delivery geographies,” explains Gopalan. “The feedback from clients has been very enthusiastic and we’ve begun getting recognition from industry analyst firms about the changes we’ve made.”
HGS, whose client mix includes some of the country’s largest health insurers, last year made two strategic acquisitions as part of the company’s expanding healthcare vertical focus. Through the organization’s healthcare vertical, HGS’s clients are armed with industry-leading population health management services to become more innovative and competitive, and not just meet disruption, but lean into it.
