Wipro's health care deals get an artificial intelligence booster shot

Information technology (IT) giant Wipro has a strong pipeline of large artificial intelligence (AI)-led deals in the health care vertical, according to a senior company executive.

Health care stands as the third-largest vertical for Wipro, contributing roughly 14 per cent to the company’s overall revenue.

Moreover, while most other verticals reported negative growth, health care demonstrated robust growth of 9.9 per cent year-on-year and 7.5 per cent quarter-on-quarter in constant currency during the October-December quarter.

“Wipro’s deal pipeline across payers and providers is fuelled by the accelerated adoption of AI and automation, Cloud computing, and data and analytics on the Cloud.

"Wipro’s health care business platforms are steering a pipeline of large and medium-sized business transformations.

"Large deals, committed to business transformation and delivering value through AI, automation, and platform modernisation, are in the pipeline,” said Anuj Kumar, vice-president, health care, Wipro, to Business Standard.

AI-led digital transformation initiatives of clients, coupled with the adoption of emerging technologies, are the key growth drivers for Wipro in the health care sector.

“AI and automation-led transformation of end-to-end business operations and IT systems modernisation and accelerating adoption of generative AI (GenAI) and Cloud computing to provide data insights for better patient care and cost of care management,” Kumar said.

Wipro’s AI and automation-enabled business platforms in the US government health care sector enabled payers to improve member experience and operational efficiency, driving high membership growth.

Wipro assisted five US health care payers in deploying over 60 attended and unattended bots across claims, billing, enrolment, and provider management.

This contact centre transformation using AI/machine learning bots helped the payer achieve a 33 per cent cost reduction and higher response rates, Kumar said.

In terms of geographies, Kumar said that Wipro’s health care business is driven by strong growth in the US and increased traction in Europe.

Wipro has invested $1 billion in AI to create an end-to-end innovation ecosystem with responsible AI at its core.

“Wipro Healthcare has been utilising this investment to deploy GenAI to revamp the member/patient experience and eradicate manual efforts.

"This includes connected patient intelligence for improved care, automated solutions for provider contract management, and AI-enabled provider assistance,” Kumar said.

Gartner forecasts that health care and life sciences enterprise IT spending will grow by 9.2 per cent in constant currency to reach $266.8 billion in 2024.

Health care provider chief information officers face the perennial challenge of doing more with less.

But they are being asked to do this at a time when the pace of digital transformation has never been faster, and expectations for value delivery have never been higher.

Health care providers are delivering value from their digital investments into operational excellence but are still trying to achieve enterprise consensus on their vision for digital change.

Cybersecurity, data and analytics, electronic health records, patient engagement, and virtual care are the areas where providers can provide solutions to create value for health care clients, said D D Mishra, senior director analyst, Gartner.

Through AI-led automation, Wipro has assisted a leading health care client in the US with the scheduling of nurses.

“We have partnered UiPath to build and implement a use case around shift scheduling for nurses.

"The automation bot uses AI to analyse the availability of nurses, requirements on the hospital floor based on the occupancy of beds, past schedule data, and predictive analytics of last-minute dropouts/absence to create an optimal nurse shift scheduling plan,” Kumar said.

During the October–December quarter, Wipro collaborated with Nvidia to help health care companies build AI-driven strategies, products, and services.

“This partnership with Nvidia is a great differentiator for us, given our domain expertise in the health care sector,” Wipro chief executive officer Thierry Delaporte said in an after-earnings call.