Digital Maturity Assessment Tool for Providers

Hospitals Must Keep Pace with Healthcare’s Accelerating Digital Transformation

Healthcare provider organizations are in the midst of dramatic change and dynamic pressure. The combination of low margins, increasing competition, and the requirement to adapt to changing expectations of patients, payers, and clinicians force changes to survive and thrive.

Hospitals are grappling with intersecting initiatives to modernize internal and external-facing technology, future-proof information technology (IT) infrastructure, and address shifting venues of care delivery. Simultaneously, these organizations must improve workflow and make healthcare IT more user-friendly while better managing patient care at the individual to the population level.

Healthcare organizations must strive to take on and progress digital transformation initiatives as part of their “survive and thrive” strategy. The pandemic exposed healthcare’s digital fault lines and accelerated digital transformation initiatives. That widened the gap between healthcare organizations, with those more advanced in digital transformation now able to react and adapt more quickly.

Frost & Sullivan believes the advantages and gains of hospitals advanced in digital maturity create a sustainable competitive advantage that will be difficult for organizations behind the curve to overcome. To understand more about the specific factors and outcomes associated with the digital transformation of hospitals and its impact on their success, Frost & Sullivan partnered with Innovaccer to survey a range of US hospitals.

Our research showed that hospitals with higher levels of digital maturity perform better across a range of competitive strategy, patient, and staff metrics, including outcomes, patient engagement, staff retention, revenue growth, profitability, innovation, and patient satisfaction. These highly digitally progressed hospitals were at least twice as likely to rate their performance as above their peers and tend to be larger organizations (defined as 500+ beds), or for-profit (39%).

We found hospitals are currently investing in technologies that align to more digitally sophisticated vertical industries (e.g., banking, retail, travel, transportation, etc.) and include consumer engagement, automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics.

When it comes to leveraging new IT capabilities, digitally mature hospitals are further along in adoption and ability to capture value from these technologies. For example, hospitals with high digital maturity are seven times more likely to gain systemic organizational value from AI than less progressed peers. That’s just one of several examples the research uncovered.

Moving Forward

Hospital executives should establish and continue to refine their strategic objectives and digital roadmaps to meet and exceed organizational goals. This research can help healthcare leaders find solutions and partners that can accelerate innovation and digital transformation.

In order to achieve the highest level of digital maturity, hospitals must first have a strong foundation in place, including a robust security framework and a unified patient view that goes beyond the EHR.

That foundation enables capabilities that are more digitally demanding (e.g., population health management), time-sensitive (e.g., digital front door), and emerging (e.g., AI and whatever comes next).

In the end, digital transformation adds to organizational efficiency, patient and staff retention, revenues, and profitability.

Progressing towards higher levels of digital maturity is no longer an option for healthcare organizations—rather, it is necessary for survival. And for organizations lagging behind in digital transformation, moving rapidly to address shortcomings is essential for survival.

Find out more about the research findings by clicking here-

See where your organization lands along the digital maturity curve, and how you compare to your peers-