Challenges in the Life Sciences and Healthcare (LSH) industry are inevitable with rising innovation brought in by new-gen technologies.

Some of the leading hurdles include cost and margin pressures from research and development, healthcare management and care delivery. In addition, organizations in the LSH industry face challenges with a lack of robust drug discovery pipelines, connectivity and connected systems, product recalls, as well as increasing regulations and cybersecurity.

However, these challenges also bring significant opportunities that can be leveraged with smart technologies like artificial intelligence, big data analytics, cloud, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT).

AI is changing the face of the healthcare industry, making work easier, more accurate and faster. While big data analytics provides accurate information to medical organizations that are moving from traditional ways of working to embracing the cloud and accessing real-time data through high-speed internet connections.

This is where medical devices, instruments, equipment, PCs, tablets, wearable gadgets, laptops and all types of electronic machines, need to be connected and easily accessible to doctors and healthcare employees, to provide better care and improved communication with patients.

Spread like a cobweb and keeping tabs on connected devices, IoT has positively impacted numerous sectors such as supply chain management, manufacturing industries, logistics and especially LSH.

Bringing transparency and real-time insights to an entire business operation from shop floor to top floor, IoT combines data from sensors and analytical algorithms to increase productivity, saves unnecessary costs and enhances the functioning of supporting technologies.

Examples of supporting technologies include low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN), Bluetooth low-energy, Wi-Fi, radio frequency identification (RFID) and cellular network (4G and 5G) for the transfer of data to and from data centers, together with cloud.

In the healthcare sector, IoT devices are already being used for monitoring movement, nutrition, documenting heart rates, blood glucose levels, temperature and general health conditions, together with diagnosing apnea and analyzing the elderly and infected patients.

It is also widely used for transmitting vital laboratory data from home to the hospital and within the labs where machines are connected to each other and are continuously monitored by healthcare professionals.

However, further research is required when using IoT in clinical laboratories, because the data generated out of these labs needs careful classification.

For example, typical clinical laboratory workflow begins with identifying and procuring samples, analyzing them and sharing this information with patients, doctors and hospitals.

Introducing IoT or evaluating an IoT approach in this set-up includes nine parameters: accuracy, cost, energy consumption, interoperability, performance, scalability, security and privacy, reliability and time.

Cybersecurity plays an important role here, as hackers could potentially manipulate or leak this data. Implementing zero-trust cybersecurity measures is therefore essential.

How is HCLTech serving this market?

Having won the IoT Breakthrough Award for the IoT Health & Wellness Innovation of the Year and Everest Group PEAK Matrix ‘Service Provider of the Year™ award for its life sciences and healthcare practices, technology leader HCLTech has focused on three main areas: enhancing consumer experience, improving care delivery and generating value across enterprise with its cutting-edge technologies that include AI, Data and Analytics, IoT, Product Lifecycle (PDLC) Management and Digital Process Operations.

“The real value of a digital ecosystem in healthcare systems is providing an integrated intelligence platform that can address the product value chain, clinical workflows and operations value chain together. We are seeing many MedTech companies move in this direction to build a comprehensive process intelligence platform that can integrate both clinical and service workflows,” says Partha Marella, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Medical Devices and Manufacturing segment at, HCLTech.

For example, a leading diagnostics company in the US, with a vast network of clinical labs and thousands of instruments, found it challenging to monitor the operational health of its onsite labs. With over 150 instrument types, 40,000 devices and 2,500 PCs, the company required a scalable IoT model that connected all assets to one IoT platform.

This was needed for enterprise-wide, real-time visibility into tools and digital assets and up-to-date analytics built on elementary historical data to predict machine downtimes.

Having developed the CARE (Connected Assets in Regulated Environment) platform on Microsoft Azure with security best practices and standards with unique customization for the client, HCLTech implemented CARE to the client’s network to fulfill its needs.

The CARE platform is a future-proof solution, stack built on data analytics that can be easily implemented in diverse healthcare environments. CARE’s digital and cloud-native architecture was built with on-site reliability engineering and DevOps principles that helped secure operational and transactional data management.

The platform connected all medical devices to a centralized IoT platform, monitored lab instruments and extracted telemetry data to build their minimum viable product (MVP).

By providing this unique combination of proven solutions that automate processes and accelerate time-to-market, HCLTech has powered new revenue streams for the client. It is estimated that machine downtimes will decrease by 80% and on-the-ground resource requirements by 25%.

HCLTech Smart Clinical Trials

Pharmaceutical companies continually seek faster and more effective drug-development models to address competition, consolidation, safety-monitoring, patient recruitment and retention issues during trials.

The Smart Clinical Trial (SCT) solution by HCLTech aims to make clinical trials smarter, faster and more optimized by accelerating the discovery-to-market journey for a drug.

They leverage IoT and perform day-to-day safety monitoring of the patients participating in the trial/program, thereby boosting protocol adherence and REMS compliance. This helps in the early identification of trends and patterns contributing to the enhancement in decision-making capabilities for the trial’s outcome, and saves time, effort, and capital for the companies.