All around the world, people have referred to 2020 as “The Great Pause,” and will likely remember it as such: a year when life as we know it screeched to a halt as we all grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic. A time to mourn. A time to reflect. A time to wait.
But for certain industries, 2020 was the opposite. It was a year when research and development sped up in an effort to respond to new obstacles created by the novel coronavirus. A time to experiment. A time to rigorously focus. A time to keep one’s nose to the grindstone. For Anthony Lange, senior vice president and head of healthcare and life sciences at Virtusa Corporation, “The Great Acceleration” would be a more accurate moniker.
Virtusa guides its clients toward executing successful end-to-end digital business transformation services, and as Lange points out, he was starting to see companies begin to flirt with the digitization of healthcare before COVID-19.
“Pre-pandemic, there was a little bit of telehealth,” says Lange, also touching on companies that wanted to prove the worth of their data-collecting medical devices. “I think everyone was talking about it, dabbling in it, doing research, a little bit of development. And we were seeing an uptick in contracts associated with value-based care. But from my perspective, there was not widespread adoption.”