With several healthcare organizations increasingly embracing the latest and greatest technologies to enable remote operations, the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the limitations of today’s hospital and healthcare IT infrastructure. However, many IT leaders did not make sure that the acquired technologies fit well with legacy systems in the rush to adapt, resulting in underused components and wasted expenses. As we enter a new age in healthcare, it is paramount that these entities implement innovations that help and are fiscally responsible for the overall digital transformation. The journey of IT acquisition has brought us from concentrating on the speed of components to the speed of the cloud, but we must work to further innovate. Healthcare IT providers need to analyze legacy IT acquisition activities, the latest models, and how they will develop in the future in order to implement technology that operates at a business pace.

With several healthcare organizations increasingly embracing the latest and greatest technologies to enable remote operations, the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the limitations of today’s hospital and healthcare IT infrastructure. However, many IT leaders did not make sure that the acquired technologies fit well with legacy systems in the rush to adapt, resulting in underused components and wasted expenses. As we enter a new age in healthcare, it is paramount that these entities implement innovations that help and are fiscally responsible for the overall digital transformation. The journey of IT acquisition has brought us from concentrating on the speed of components to the speed of the cloud, but we must work to further innovate. Healthcare IT providers need to analyze legacy IT acquisition activities, the latest models, and how they will develop in the future in order to implement technology that operates at a business pace.

How health systems analyze and acquire IT technology has been changed forever by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations need to prioritize IT preparation and acquisition with unprecedented levels of network traffic, telehealth requirements, and sensitive patient data to prevent procurement delays and exorbitant costs. Hospital decision-makers should consider embracing subscription and consumption-based models as 2021 budgets are being defined to assist them with the best support and secure their data and meet the demands of tomorrow.