According to Digital Health Technology Vision 2018, a market report issued by Accenture, the healthcare industry is aggressively adopting intelligent technologies, such as the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, many health organizations need new capabilities to ensure that technology acts with responsibility and transparency as businesses evolve.
According to the report, more than three-fourths (77%) of the 100 health executives surveyed said they expect to invest in IoT and smart sensors this year – the highest among the 20 industries included in the broader Accenture Technology Vision research on which the health industry report was based. In addition, more than half (53%) of the health executives expect to invest in AI systems, with four-fifths (86%) of the executives saying that their organizations use data to drive automated decision-making at an unprecedented scale.
However, as AI continues to play a greater role in decision-making, four-fifths (81%) of health executives said they are not prepared to face the societal and liability issues that will require them to explain their AI-based actions and decisions. As a result, about three-fourths (73%) said they plan to develop internal ethical standards for AI to ensure that their AI systems act responsibly.
In addition, health organizations also face a new kind of vulnerability: inaccurate, manipulated and biased data that leads to corrupted insights and skewed results. More than five-sixths (86%) of health executives have not yet invested in capabilities to verify data sources across their most critical systems. In addition, one-fourth (24%) of the executives said that they have been the target of adversarial AI behaviors, like falsified location data or bot fraud.
Report findings include:
- More than four in five (82%) of the executives said that extended reality – comprising virtual- and augmented-reality technologies – removes the hurdle of distance in access to people, information and experience, with nearly half (48%) of health providers and one-sixth (16%) of health payers planning to invest in these technologies in the next year.
- Nine-tenths (91%) of health executives believe that blockchain and smart contracts are critical to enabling a frictionless business over the next three years, and approximately the same number (88%) believe that microservices will be crucial for scaling and integrating ecosystem partnerships.
- Four-fifths (82%) of health executives believe that “edge” architecture will speed the maturity of hyperconnected health environments, and slightly more (85%) believe that generating real-time insights from the volumes of data expected in the future will require computing “at the edge,” where data is generated. Yet the clear majority (86%) of health executives believe that they’ll need to balance cloud and edge computing to maximize technology infrastructure agility and enable intelligence everywhere throughout their organization.
For more details, visit Accenture.