PwC’s Raymond Martin explores his day to day at the intersection of technology and healthcare.

“I lead technology-driven transformation for PwC’s health sector clients in Ireland, helping them improve patient care, expand access to services and run more efficient operations,” said Raymond Martin, a health technology director for the organisation.  

He explained that, more and more, healthcare teams are being asked to do more with the same resources, so targeted transformation using technology is often the single biggest lever for change. 

Here he discusses his day to day at PwC.

If there is such a thing, what is a typical day in your job like?

There really isn’t one and that’s a positive. The pace of change across technology, health and business over the last five years has been astonishing and AI has put it into overdrive in the last two.

My time tends to split three ways. First, overseeing live client delivery, technology roll-outs in acute hospitals, community teams and national programmes, often involving significant redesign of care pathways to enhance collection and use of data and promote data and process standardisation. Second, working with our clinical and operational experts to shape new services based on what clients are asking for and the trends we’re seeing globally. Third, helping our PwC team evolve and working out what the market shift means for our people, their skills and their careers.

In the more than 20 years you have worked in the health-tech space, how has the landscape evolved?

It’s night and day. 20 years ago, health-tech was dominated by back-office systems, heavy custom development, complex configuration projects and clinical systems that were largely paper-based or niche high tech. Delivery of any change took years.

When I started on Medicaid systems in the US in 2008, the average time from design to first release was four years and some releases might be a year apart. Five years later, working on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in California, that had dropped to two years. The explosion of cloud infrastructure and SaaS platforms brought it down to under a year and Covid compressed it again to months. 

During Covid, for the New Mexico Department of Health, I led a team through mobilisation of a contact centre, CRM deployment and the onboarding of hundreds of staff, beginning operations within 30 days and adding most functionality within three months of that. The challenge for us is making sure governance and methodology keep pace so speed doesn’t introduce new risk. The other big shift is the democratisation of technology. 20 years ago, technology was a niche skill. Today our clients come prepared, fluent in the tools and often using AI to enhance their own awareness and position in conversations.

How is technology transforming the future health space?

It’s hard to find a corner of healthcare that technology won’t touch. The clinician-patient relationship will remain the human core, but everything around it is changing fast. Data is the first frontier. Healthcare generates extraordinary volumes of rich data, but it has historically been trapped in silos, useful inside one system or location, invisible everywhere else.

Joining that data across boundaries unlocks huge value, like better national and local service planning for a start. With better access to clinical data and the ability to augment it with lifestyle data from wearable devices and eating habits, patients can actively manage their own health as well as their care journeys. The most obvious advantage is it gives clinicians a fuller picture of the person in front of them.

Beyond the clinical interaction, cloud platforms and AI are reshaping access to care. Virtual consultations, remote monitoring and hospital-at-home are becoming normal. AI assistants will help people build healthier habits and manage conditions preventatively. Genetic screening will drive tailored therapies into the mainstream and AI-accelerated trials will shorten the path from discovery to approval. And that’s just the start.

What are some of the challenges and how are they managed?

The pace of technology change is now stress-testing the governance and procurement models organisations rely on. They simply weren’t built for this rate of arrival.

Healthcare and public sector clients feel it most because they operate in highly regulated environments and rightly so. Patient safety, public confidence, data privacy and responsible use of public money are the currencies they trade in.

‘Move fast and break things’ is not a viable strategy in a hospital. Processes must be proven safe and compliant before they can be adopted. Our role is to help our clients adopt new technology at pace without compromising on those fundamentals, putting the right methodologies, assurance frameworks and clinical governance in place so innovation and safety move forward together.

Another challenge our clients are grappling with is finding the right path to adopt AI and get real return on the investment. That came through clearly in PwC’s recent Global Performance Survey. The answer is moving beyond isolated proof-of-value pilots into AI-enabled process handling at scale, and examining growth opportunities rather than just cost savings. In healthcare, that translates to taking administrative burden off frontline and back-office staff, applying AI to the problems it’s genuinely better at. That’s where real value can be unlocked.

Are you noticing new and emerging trends so far in 2026?

AI is the story of 2026. It has moved out of novelty and experimentation into mainstream adoption. A significant share of the population now uses it daily, including clinicians and patients. People have seen what AI does for the customer service they get from their insurance company, their utility provider, or their streaming service and they expect the same standard from their healthcare provider. Chat tools mean patients arrive at appointments better informed about their own conditions, which is changing the dynamic of consultations. We’re also seeing native AI companies turn their focus to health, which will accelerate the pipeline of AI-driven products coming to market.

Have you any advice for professionals interested in a career similar to yours?

Stay positive. There’s a lot of pessimism in the headlines about disruption and changing business models, but disruption is often the biggest accelerator of opportunity. If you look beyond the displacement headlines, there’s a bigger story about the opportunities being created by AI.

This is the fifth major technology disruption cycle of my career, starting with the dot-com crash in 2001. I was an intern expecting a graduate job that didn’t materialise because of the crash. That led to a different job and a career that took me from Ireland to the US, Canada, India, the UK and a few places in between. 

Every cycle since, from the financial crash of 2008 to the cloud and SAAS revolution of 2011, even Covid, has been initially destructive but has ultimately created more opportunities for people in this industry. This is the reality we’re seeing as right now we are growing and hiring for our advisory health team.

My second piece of advice, don’t wait for doors to be opened for you. Ask. Tell people what you’re interested in, ask for new roles, ask for introductions, find out what’s possible. You manage your own career. That’s as true now as it has ever been.

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