Digitally Mature Providers Glean More Value from Analytics, AI Adoption

A new report by Frost & Sullivan, commissioned by Innovaccer, has found links between US health system digital maturity and performance across several digital transformation metrics, including the adoption of cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Overall, the report indicates that health IT investments are concentrated on more sophisticated digital transformation projects and technologies, including automation, analytics, and streamlining or unifying existing digital systems. In the coming year, 73 percent of health systems of hospitals will invest in improving their analytics capabilities, while 72 percent will focus on automating their processes and workflows.

For health systems looking to grow in these areas, the report recommends taking a long-term view of investments and choosing IT partners capable of supporting multiple use cases across an expanding digital portfolio. These investments should utilize the health system’s own data platform to avoid data silos and ensure that various digital solutions can work together, according to the report.

In terms of cloud computing, the report found that health systems with high digital maturity lead in shifting their workflows to the cloud. Of those surveyed, 79 percent of high digital maturity organizations reported having all or most of their data analytics systems in the cloud, compared to 57 percent of average maturity and 39 percent of low maturity health systems.

The report also indicates that most health systems now feel that they need a cloud strategy, particularly for their virtual and remote care and EHR systems. Sixty-five percent of health systems reported having all or most of their virtual and remote care in the cloud, while 62 percent embraced the cloud for their EHR systems.

Overall, high digital maturity hospitals were found to be much further along in moving their IT workloads over to the cloud. The report recommends that less mature organizations aim to leverage the cloud as a platform for health IT to help make deployments and the scaling of new solutions more efficient in the future.

Despite this move toward the cloud, the report also indicates that health systems are not taking full advantage of analytics. When asked which systems they have enabled for analytics, 50 percent of high maturity and 24 percent of low maturity organizations reported having fully enabled analytics for the EHR. Only 41 percent of high maturity and 3 percent of low maturity health systems indicated that they had fully enabled analytics for patient engagement.

According to the report, these figures indicate that health systems should leverage unified data models to integrate data at the enterprise level and to ensure high-quality data for insight generation. The report also found that data readiness, which is key to maximizing value from advanced analytics, is lacking across organizations.

Further, the report shows that digital maturity has a significant impact on the organizational adoption of AI and machine learning (ML). Approximately 62 percent of high digital maturity health systems are at a systemic or transformational phase with these technologies, meaning that AI and ML are pervasively used for digital processes and chain transformation or are part of the organization’s business DNA. In contrast, 45 percent of low maturity organizations are only at an awareness level regarding these technologies and may not even be experimenting with adopting them.

Because of these adoption gaps, high digital maturity organizations are seven times more likely to gain systemic value from AI and ML. To close these gaps, the report recommends that health systems with low digital maturity seek to establish a comprehensive data foundation to gain value from AI and ML investments, while organizations with average maturity seek a data and analytics platform to gain systemic value from AI and ML.

Other recent reports have also highlighted various trends in healthcare’s adoption of IT and analytics technologies.

Last month, KLAS found that most healthcare organizations experienced reduced costs, shorter project timelines, and improved care coordination while using Microsoft Cloud technologies.

In a similar report evaluating Amazon Web Services (AWS), KLAS reported that most healthcare organizations reported better and faster processes, improved clinician and patient experience, and reduced costs while leveraging the solution.

A June report published by Forrester outlined some of the challenges that healthcare organizations face with technology adoption, including security and compliance issues. It also provided best practices when implementing technologies such as cloud platforms, AI and ML, and Software-as-a-Service.