Healthcare organizations have spent massively on HIT in recent years, in hopes of preparing for success by building next-generation tech infrastructure. If a new survey is any indication, while the current set of efforts haven’t born as much fruit as their leaders like, they remain hopeful that the next wave will better support their goals.
The SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study, which surveyed about 400 healthcare executives, looked at whether the healthcare industry was prepared for the digital economy.
Respondents told SAP (and survey partner Oxford Economics) that the existing technology investments weren’t delivering the value they wanted, with only 22% saying they supported customer satisfaction efforts and 23% saying that they helped foster innovation.
Fortunately for health IT vendors, however, that wasn’t the whole story. Perhaps because hope springs eternal, healthcare leaders predicted that in two years thing should look different.
In fact, 70% said that the latest technologies were essential to growth, competitive advantage and customer experience. In two years, 61% expect technology investments to boost customer satisfaction, and 59% believe the technologies will help support innovation.
This may be, at least in part, because many healthcare organizations are in the process of kicking off digital transformation efforts and are relying on new technologies to achieve their goals. Though the process hasn’t advanced too far in many organizations, respondents all seem to be making some progress.
According to the survey, healthcare execs expect the importance of digital transformation to climb over the next several years. While 61% said it’s important today, 79% expect it to be important in two years and 86% believe that it will be important in five years.
To prepare for these eventualities, 23% of respondents said are planning digital transformation initiatives and 54% are piloting these approaches. In addition, 32% reported that their efforts were complete in some areas and 2% said their process was complete in all areas. Almost half (48%) said a lack of mature technology was holding back their efforts.
When asked to name the technologies they expected to use, 76% of healthcare leaders predicted that big data and analytics will help them transform their business. They also named cloud computing (65%), IoT technologies (46%) and AI (28%) as tools likely to foster digital transformation process.
I don’t know about you, but personally, I’d be pretty upset if I’d spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on this wave of health IT and felt that I’d gotten little value out of it. And given that history, I’d be reluctant to make any new investments until I was confident things play out differently this time.
Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that healthcare execs are taking their time with implementing digital transformation, as important as this process may be. With any luck, the next wave of digital technology will be more flexible and offer greater ROI than the previous generation.
