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About 58 per cent healthcare industry professionals globally believe that digital transformation initiatives would be slowed down due to inflation and rising costs, a new report showed on Tuesday.

About 63 per cent of healthcare and pharmaceutical industry professionals in North America expected a disruption to digitalisation initiatives in their business units due to inflation.

The same opinion was expressed by 55 per cent of industry professionals in Europe and 47 per cent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Global Data, a leading data and analytics company.

"Rising costs of labour and raw materials has become a dominant topic of 2022. Inflation is expected to put some pressure on the profit growth of pharma businesses, resulting in reduced investment activities that may impact digital transformation projects," said Elton Kwok, Market Research Manager of Pharma at GlobalData.

Digitalisation requires funding, time and talent and inflation and costs pressures may force companies to scale back focus and investment in these projects, he commented.

Digital transformation involves the implementation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, application programming interfaces (API) and others.