Survey: Improving Patient Experiences a Top Priority for HIT Leaders in 2019

Health IT leaders rate updating technology to improve the patient experience as their top objective for 2019, according to the seventh annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey conducted by Stoltenberg Consulting Inc.

For this year’s survey, more than 300 healthcare professionals participated, representing a spectrum of provider facilities including health systems, standalone hospitals, physician practices and other ambulatory care facilities. Clinical IT professionals led survey participation (38 percent), while executive/C-suite leaders followed closely behind (36 percent).

Forty-two percent of health IT leaders said that updating technology to improve the patient experience is their top objective for 2019, followed by measuring improvement in patient care (33 percent). These two goals far surpass the more traditional goals of “improving staff retention and satisfaction” (12 percent) and “maximizing reimbursement opportunities” (13 percent).

In fact, empowering the patient journey stood out as a core theme from this survey’s findings. Forty-five percent of respondents identified value-based care as the most significant and pressing topic in healthcare this year, followed by artificial intelligence (26 percent) and cybersecurity (20 percent). Meanwhile, leveraging meaningful patient data (32 percent) serves as the largest overall hurdle for health IT teams in 2019, followed closely by ineffective IT or EHR (electronic health record) operations (29 percent).  

As far as the biggest operational burdens for healthcare organizations, lack of system interoperability was the top response (54 percent), followed by rising overhead and staff costs (17 percent), financial reimbursements (15 percent) and EHR burnout or reporting burden (14 percent).

Other key survey findings indicated that despite nearly universal initial adoption across the country, EHR and application implementation support (34 percent) remains the top 2019 IT outsourcing request, followed by optimization work (27 percent), legacy system support (22 percent) and help desk support (17 percent). Yet, with current IT training offered, 63 percent of respondents say they feel “unprepared” or “very unprepared” to manage and execute effective IT operations within their healthcare facilities.

“Thanks to the continuing industry push for healthcare interoperability, significant progress is starting to come to fruition,” Dan O’Connor, vice president of client relations at Stoltenberg Consulting, said in a statement. “We’re now seeing a clearer picture of how different players across the care spectrum will be held accountable to drive more transparent, engaged patient care journeys, which in turn will help healthcare providers meet their organizational goals.”