Medical Marketing and Media (MM&M): Cognizant’s Global Head of Digital Healthcare Named Among Top 40 Healthcare Transformers of 2016

Cognizant’s Meg Columbia-Walsh, Global Head of Digital Healthcare, has been named among the Top 40 Healthcare Transformers of 2016 by Medical Marketing and Media (MM&M) magazine.

The list consists of 40 executives, investors, entrepreneurs, designers and thinkers who are ushering the industry into its new technological golden era.

The magazine writes, “When it comes to digital healthcare, there are few people on the planet with as much historical knowledge as Columbia-Walsh."

It notes, "In 1998, she founded and served as CEO of what is thought to be the first digital advertising agency, HealthTech Digital Communications. She then went on to found and helm three other successful companies—the most recent of which, mobile ad agency Inverse Mobile, was snapped up by Ernst & Young.”

“I was sort of an accidental entrepreneur,” Columbia-Walsh explains. “I think the one thing I had was a strength in anticipating trends related to technology and then being able to translate them from a business standpoint.”

In her role at Cognizant, Columbia-Walsh is helping build a digital works team intended to concentrate on strategic planning at the intersection of payers, providers and data analysis.

“It won’t just be digital for the sake of digital,” she says. “It will be because it affects my clients’ business.”

Columbia-Walsh believes digital healthcare will eventually become so pervasive and widespread that it will cease being a separate category unto itself and simply be viewed as part of the everyday healthcare marketing and media mix.

“The thinking can no longer be tactical. It needs to be enterprise-wide, just total change,” she adds. “Companies need to increase the spend to match the usage. That is true transformation. That's the kind of point I want to get through.”