Balancing Expectations for Digital Transformation in the Healthcare: Development of the New Cancer Registry in Latvia

Abstract

The healthcare sector has been slower to embrace digital transformation compared to other industries. However, it is evident that digitalization offers significant growth and innovation potential, particularly in ensuring patient-centric healthcare. Despite this potential, implementing digital solutions often involves a disproportionately lengthy and challenging process. As an EU member state, Latvia has achieved considerable progress in digitalization, especially in cancer treatment and related data processing. A modern, population-based cancer registry can serve several crucial purposes from both the patient’s perspective and in analyzing healthcare quality, cost-effectiveness, service demand, supply, and policy development. Even though digital transformation began over a decade ago, the first phase of national level oncology data management was only implemented in 2024. The key takeaway here is that “Digital Transformation is not merely an IT project!” In the observed case, critical factors influencing success included industry professionals’ readiness for change and the active impact of EU initiatives, combining both bottom-up and top-down approaches.