Digital health is advancing across the industry, with telehealth making strong gains and greater adoption of solutions that support value-based care, population health, patient and clinician engagement, and security, according a new CHIME Digital Health Most Wired survey.
The findings were published this month in the annual Digital Health Most Wired National Trends report, which is available online on the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) website. This year’s survey represented more than 30,000 facilities, with 754 surveys completed by healthcare organizations in 14 countries. In 2020, CHIME added a long-term care survey to the existing domestic, ambulatory and international survey offerings. The trends report is based on aggregated survey data from U.S. participants.
Key findings include:
• The usage and adoption of telehealth more than doubled between 2019 and 2020.
• As healthcare shifts to a consumer-focused model, price transparency is becoming even more critical.
• Population health management (PHM) activities have risen dramatically, with an average 18 percentage point bump in the use of tools to support PHM strategies.
• Portals now are commonly accessed by patients, and almost all organizations offer mobile app capabilities.
• Hospitals and healthcare systems are leveraging EHRs for timely clinician alerts.
• The adoption of artificial intelligence is steadily increasing.
• About one third of organizations have adopted all the components of a comprehensive security program in 2020, up from 24 percent last year.
They survey findings revealed that some organizations already had a telehealth foundation in place, which allowed them to quickly scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. About three in 10 of Most Wired organizations reported more than 10 percent of their unique patients used telehealth in 2019. That rate of participation jumped to about two in three organizations in 2020, with about half of them reporting usage above 25 percent. Telehealth adoption in most care settings rose by approximately 40 percentage points.
What’s more, with the shift toward the patient as a consumer, many healthcare organizations are expanding their price transparency capabilities. Nearly two thirds of respondents have adopted technologies to facilitate patient payment estimates and 40 percent have adopted solutions that estimate cost based on insurance type.
Every measure for PHM made gains in 2020, with advancements in data aggregation, data analysis, care management, administrative and financial reporting, and patient and clinician engagement. More than 90 percent of organizations provide patients access and secure communications with clinicians through a portal, and 96 percent of respondents have a mobile app. More than 80 percent have integrated clinical surveillance systems with their EHR and many have expanded the types of clinical alerts. About 17 percent of organizations have fully deployed some version of AI and are getting outcomes and 35 percent of Most Wired participants reported they are in the process of implementing AI.
Cybersecurity showed some improvements, particularly with organizations having a dedicated cybersecurity committee, a dedicated security operations center and a documented risk management program. But only 72 percent organizations have a designated chief security information officer, which is only a 2 percentage point increase from 2019.
“We are seeing progress across the board in the adoption of digital health strategies that improve health and care,” CHIME President and CEO Russell P. Branzell said in a statement. “The survey covers multiple categories to assess how effectively and where healthcare organizations are advancing on their digital health journeys. Some categories like telehealth saw significant increases in adoption and usage while others like cybersecurity advanced more modestly. Overall, the trajectory is positive with top performers setting standards that are driving the industry forward.”
