Three Things the Pandemic Accelerated in Healthcare Technology That Are Not Reversing

Two years of clinical technology deployment under emergency conditions produced structural changes to how health systems evaluate and adopt software. Having tracked healthcare AI investment across this period and spoken with clinical informatics leaders at a dozen hospital systems, we believe three changes are permanent features of the landscape.

First: remote care became a compliance-managed workflow, not an exception. Telehealth was treated as an emergency accommodation before the pandemic. After two years of large-scale deployment, health systems have built compliance infrastructure around it — billing protocols, documentation standards, consent workflows, and HIPAA-aligned data architectures. The result is that the bar for new virtual care technologies has risen significantly. A telehealth tool that could have launched on a minimal compliance basis in 2018 now needs to fit within an existing operational and regulatory framework. This raises the entry barrier but also raises the value of companies that meet it.

Second: physician-facing AI adoption velocity accelerated and has not reversed. The willingness of clinical staff to adopt technology that reduces administrative burden — rather than adding to it — increased measurably during the pandemic. Documentation burden was the most visible driver: physicians spending two to three hours per shift on chart notes had an acute motivation to evaluate AI documentation tools that prior generations of clinical IT would not have had. The companies that entered the market with clinical documentation AI during this period built adoption curves that do not reset when the emergency conditions lift.

Third: health system vendor relationships became more concentrated, not less. The operational urgency of the pandemic led health systems to expand existing vendor relationships rather than onboard new ones. The companies that were already embedded in clinical workflows in 2020 deepened their positions during the emergency and emerged with stronger customer relationships. New entrants in 2022 face a health system landscape that is more consolidated around fewer technology vendors than it was before. This favors companies with existing institutional relationships over those trying to establish them for the first time.