With more options about where, how and for whom employees want to work, the life sciences and healthcare sector must not only adopt digital methods of working – but design for the future human experience. This means not just creating one-size-fits-all hybrid workspaces but designing solutions that meet each employee’s priorities, both now and in the future. 

Hybrid working is here to stay, but the often-piecemeal approach to digital transformation taken by organizations in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic – out of necessity, rather than vision – must now be transitioned into a long-term strategy for flexible, secure, and productive working models. Already, organizations in the sector are responding to this need, with Deloitte reporting that 82% are planning to continue the digitalization of services beyond those pandemic-enforced changes. 

This sector is not alone in adopting hybrid working for the long term; it has become the norm across multiple verticals. However, the healthcare and life sciences sector relies more than most on in-person work and collaboration — from time in the laboratory to field research and conducting trials. To continue conducting these activities successfully while also facilitating employees’ ability to work productively from anywhere, the sector needs to adopt technology that provides superior, joined-up user experiences.

Fractured experiences such as fragmented communications and poor accessibility to critical resources can damage the user experience, and worse still, hinder progress to potentially life-saving research and development. These employees rely on the ability to communicate information accurately, seamlessly and in real-time - and they also need to do so securely, without having to worry about compliance concerns. 

In fact, a study on digital workplace productivity, including life sciences respondents, revealed that employees achieve just 60% of their potential work output due to poor connectivity and application experiences, making intuitive remote working tools and environments a top priority. 

The sector has already shown it can work quickly and with huge success throughout the pandemic, delivering life-saving vaccines while also driving other medical and scientific research forwards, including the development of a novel drug for Primary-Progressive Multiple Sclerosis and a ‘Squirrel Parkour’ study that represents a breakthrough in robotics. With hybrid working firmly established and continuing to evolve, companies in this sector must grasp the opportunity to achieve successful transformation, ensuring breakthroughs like this continue to be made in a new working model.

Focusing on the power of a human, user-centered approach will help to achieve this, while leveraging technology to improve interactivity between dispersed teams will accelerate research, development and release cycles. In focusing on a long-term, future-thinking approach to the workspace, the sector must take the following key considerations into account: 

• The need to adapt and evaluate technology continuously to ensure it supports new behaviors – adjusting accordingly to different hybrid workstyles. In 2021, almost 70% of health care practitioners (HCPs) were digital natives. That number is only going to grow as time goes on, delivering an imperative to upgrade the user experience for dispersed teams.
• Enabling interdisciplinary collaboration: for example, the development of the Covid-19 vaccine between the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca demonstrates the importance of seamless collaboration in hybrid work, and companies must invest in virtual workspaces that enhance the ability of employees to streamline the importance of crucial project information in an agile, yet secure way.
• Investing in solutions that provide proactive monitoring tools for supervisors and IT leaders to ensure network performance, application usage and security are all optimized on an ongoing basis. To maximize the effectiveness of such solutions on a long-term basis, as well as to manage costs, organizations can leverage managed services offerings, which bring together the required leading-edge tech solutions and industry-specific customer service expertise.

Fortunately, UX software, virtual desktop platforms, and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) managed services will optimize audio-video collaboration capabilities, preventing delays and leading to a rich, high-definition user experience on any device - and enabling reliable service delivery on a hybrid cloud platform. Solutions that allow for 3D graphics cards to be present on a few servers, where users can access them from shared sessions, help to provide visually rich images from any mobile device, too. 

For life sciences firms, having the most powerful tech solutions as part of their infrastructure is essential for innovation and exploration. Take cutting-edge Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (CRYO-EM) - a next-generation imaging technique that allows scientists to observe biomolecules in thrilling detail at sub-nanometer resolution. For this, specialized digital tools transform cryo-EM samples - encompassing thousands of high-resolution (4K) two-dimensional images - into 3D models and motion clips. And so, only next-generation future-fit technologies will do. 

The optimal user experience and flexibility of the digital solutions we’ve discussed, coupled with robust security, also facilitate agile collaboration between dispersed teams, thus streamlining the communication of crucial project information. 

By harnessing this technology, healthcare and life sciences companies can realize their long-term visions with a successful transformation of working models. The world relies on the sector to continually work towards creating new treatments that help people live longer and healthier lives - and this makes it vital that organizations get their digital transformation just right. 

The good news is, implementing advanced technologies to bring this about needn’t be a daunting task. Together, Wipro and Citrix support healthcare and life sciences organizations to future fit their workplaces, with a secure, high performant Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), built to power productive, seamless enterprises. To find out how you can benefit from a secure hybrid work solution with superior user experience, visit our dedicated healthcare sector focused site here: