National Survey of Healthcare Leaders Tracks Digital Transformation Progress
New research from Innovaccer shows most healthcare organizations are working to enable digital transformation, with only a few being entirely “digitally ready”
Innovaccer Inc., the Health Cloud company, released the 2021 edition of “The Science of Digital Transformation in Healthcare and Why It’s Vital for Payer-Provider Collaboration.” The 14-page report assessed more than 4,000 survey responses from healthcare professionals over the first six months of 2021. The responses highlighted the crucial elements for success in value-based care contracts and how health cloud and data activation technologies can accelerate transformation through increased connectivity, data unification, analytic insights, and data transparency.
The report provides insights into healthcare organizations’ progress toward digital transformation. It also explores how cloud computing fits into payers’ and providers’ priorities and how organizations with upgraded technologies have streamlined operations, reduced costs, improved patient experiences, and achieved clinical excellence.
Survey findings show that while just 10% of healthcare organizations said they’ve completed their digital transformation, most respondents are planning (23%) or actively working (49%) to enable digital transformation. Another 16% are actively seeking a partner to develop and initiate a plan. 2.5% reported they don’t know where or how to start.
Not surprisingly, expanding telehealth services was the top digital transformation goal for the many (39%) of respondents. Automating care management was a close second with 30% of respondents wanting to create automated patient communication protocols and triggers, automated care pathways and coordination steps (20%), and enhance rapid triage and risk assessment capabilities (11%).
About 10% of organizations said they use real-time insights to increase collaboration (which aligns with the 10% that have achieved digital transformation). Nearly 12% said they’re working in silos, and 26% reported they hardly collaborate at all. The majority (53%) share data as needed—and many do it manually. A third of respondents said a lack of payer-provider collaboration prevents them from achieving clinical and financial goals.
Lastly, the top five priorities among all respondents included: improving clinical operations (68%), establishing a data-driven culture (51%), modernizing their data platform (38%), integrating disparate systems (35%), and rationalizing IT expenditures (25%). All these priorities can be achieved through digital transformation on a health cloud computing platform.
“The pandemic exposed the importance of improving payer-provider collaboration, moving to risk, and accelerating digital transformation,” said Mike Sutten, Chief Technology Officer at Innovaccer. “Health systems that depended on fee-for-service saw their business models up-ended, while those that depended on transformative digital technologies to deliver care were better prepared to weather the storm. We hope these findings help payers and providers improve collaboration and accelerate the transformation that healthcare needs.”
Download the full report to learn more.