How to innovate and drive value in healthcare & life sciences

The healthcare & life sciences industries are at a turning point. Leaders know they must innovate, but the path is often obscured by buzzwords, fragmented tools, and aging systems.

At the 2025 AWS Healthcare Investor & Executive Summit, Modus Create’s Chief Executive Officer, Sharon Lynch, and Chief Strategy Officer, Sarah McCasland, shared practical ways leaders can focus on meaningful, measurable innovation, from improving patient outcomes to modernizing securely. If you’re looking for signal over static, this conversation is for you.

1. What is the biggest challenge healthcare & life sciences leaders face today?

Sharon: The biggest challenge right now is the noise. CTOs and CIOs keep hearing they need AI, but many don’t know where to start. Many companies still don’t have a clear AI strategy because they’re overwhelmed by point solutions.

At Modus Create, we help them cut through that. You can’t ask a doctor, nurse, or scheduler to bounce between a dozen tools. The key is to unify workflows and focus on what truly adds value—not on gimmicky applications that don’t move the needle.

2. You mentioned “value.” Where should organizations focus their efforts to see a real impact?

Sarah: The ultimate goal is better patient experiences and outcomes. Leaders often aim for revolutionary projects, but you don’t need to go big to have an impact. Real value is enabling nurses and doctors to spend their time doing what they were trained to do.

If AI can remove administrative work from their plates, that’s transformative. It prevents burnout and lets people focus on high-value work.

"Leaders often aim for revolutionary projects, but you don’t need to go big to have an impact. Real value is enabling nurses and doctors to spend their time doing what they were trained to do."

Sharon: Exactly. We recently heard about a case where scientists were spending most of their time typing experiment results. With automation, they projected a 60% uplift in productive time. Imagine redirecting that brainpower toward discovery. That’s the kind of value we want to unlock.

3. Beyond AI, what other hurdles hold organizations back?

Sharon: Many organizations are still early in their cloud journey. They’re trapped behind legacy technology stacks. I’ve worked with clients who had to modernize after a merger, spending $15–20 million per program just to move off mainframes.

We help organizations modernize with purpose. It’s not about lifting and shifting. It’s about evolving infrastructure to be secure, scalable, and resilient. True modernization means you’ll never get stuck again.

"It’s not about lifting and shifting. It’s about evolving infrastructure to be secure, scalable, and resilient. True modernization means you’ll never get stuck again."

4. How does organizational change fit into this picture?

Sarah: Change management is critical. We saw it during the cloud and agile waves, and now it’s just as essential in the AI era. You can have the best technology and a brilliant strategy, but if your people aren’t brought along on the journey, it won’t work. Adoption is everything.

5. Can you share an example of a successful implementation?

Sarah: We partnered with EVERSANA—working closely with the AWS for Healthcare & Life Sciences team—to build EVERSANA ORCHESTRATE™ MLR, a generative AI solution that transformed their medical-legal-regulatory (MLR) review process. EVERSANA’s challenge was that their review workflows were highly manual and time-consuming, often involving multiple stakeholders, compliance checks, and thousands of pages of content.

Working with our team, EVERSANA developed a single platform that automates 90% of routine MLR tasks—reducing review cycles from weeks to hours, and delivering an 86% reduction in submission errors.

Sharon: The application is intuitive, compliant, and secure. The client now uses it to explore new high-value use cases. It’s a perfect example of focusing on practical, tangible results in a highly regulated life sciences environment.

6. What makes Modus Create uniquely positioned to help in this sector?

Sarah: We have deep expertise in healthcare & life sciences, but we also bring insights from other industries. There’s overlap with financial services when it comes to regulation and security, and we learn from retail’s success in UX and customer adoption.

Nearly every patient has a phone. We take a consumer-first mindset, ensuring the solutions we build are actually used. It’s not just about solving a pharmaceutical problem; it’s about solving a human-experience problem.

Sharon: Absolutely. We’re a global company, so understanding diverse regulations is second nature. Our teams include security experts, researchers, and engineers who understand everything from R&D to production, and others who bring fresh perspectives from manufacturing and finance. That blend makes our approach unique.

7. What should be the top priorities for leaders right now?

Sarah: Security, AI, and modernization. Those are the pillars. The questions every leader should ask are: How do we stay ahead? How do we create value?

At Modus Create, that’s how we operate. Modernizing systems, using AI internally and for clients, and doing it all securely. Nobody talks about companies that get security right; they only hear about the ones that don’t.

Sharon: At the end of the day, our clients hire people they can trust to solve hard problems. Software development is an act of creativity with a purpose. We’re not building “cool widgets.” We’re creating outcomes. Lower costs. Better care. A stronger system overall.

Key takeaways for healthcare & life sciences leaders

• Cut through the noise. Focus on outcomes, not hype.
• Unify workflows. Technology should make people’s jobs easier, not harder.
• Modernize with intent. Don’t just move to the cloud. Evolve your infrastructure.
• Prioritize adoption. Transformation succeeds when people are part of it.
• Lead with trust. Great partners solve hard problems creatively and securely.

Healthcare innovation isn’t about chasing every new technology. It’s about using the right ones to create value where it matters most. By unifying systems, empowering people, and focusing on real outcomes, the industry can move from incremental improvement to meaningful change.

Modus Create helps organizations modernize infrastructure, harness AI responsibly, and deliver real-world impact. See how healthcare & life sciences leaders can innovate securely.