By Monica E. Oss, Chief Executive Officer, OPEN MINDS
For specialty and primary care provider organizations, the digital transformation is all about using technology to transform the experience of, and relationship with, their consumers. But there is no “right” technology to achieve that transformation. The goal of any new technology includes providing predictive analytics for performance management, improving the consumer experience, facilitating the relationship with payers, and reducing costs. The critical question is, where are specialty provider organizations on the path to digital transformation? We got in-depth answers from this year’s 2022 OPEN MINDS Health & Human Services Technology Survey.
Specialty provider organizations have made more investments in changing their interaction with consumers in recent years. That was the focus of my opening remarks, The Tech-Enabled Provider Organization: The 2022 OPEN MINDS Health & Human Services Technology Survey – Sponsored By Qualifacts, at the 2022 OPEN MINDS Technology & Analytics Institute. Our survey found that 62% of specialty provider organizations have secure messaging. This compares to 85% of hospitals and 83% of physician practices. Sixty-one percent have some type of online scheduling. Fifty-eight percent have a consumer portal for access to records and online bill payment, and 45% have tools that let consumers provide information online. But only 8% have some type of online consumer price transparency. That figure is over 60% across all health and human service organizations.
And there have been more investments in data management. Fifty-eight percent of specialty provider organizations report having interoperability functionality, allowing data exchange with other health and human service organizations. Thirty percent have population health management tools that allow risk stratification and predictive analytics.
Not surprisingly, tech budgets and staffing are directly related to organizational size. Specialty provider organizations under $10 million in annual revenue had median technology budgets of $750,000, while those over $50 million in annual revenue had median technology budgets of $2.5 million. For organizations under $10 million in annual revenue, median tech staffing was two full-time employees. Organizations with over $50 million in annual revenue have a median of eight full-time employees.
Despite the investments, planned digital transformation in health care often fails. The reasons are many. For one, organizations fail to create the strategy that defines the transformation before investing in the technology. Another is lack of developing new business models that capitalize on the new tech-enabled functionality. And yet another reason is the inability of leadership teams to manage the organizational transformation (people and processes, as well as technology).
This reminds me of the words of author Heather Ash Amara: “Change is inevitable but transformation is by conscious choice.”