Patient engagement will be a top priority for healthcare organizations next year. And they will have to make significant investments to connect more effectively with patients and improve outcomes, says a new report from consulting and research firm PwC.

Other top issues healthcare organizations, especially hospitals and health systems, will face include implementing better security for wireless medical devices and the Internet of Things, and using early forms of artificial intelligence.

49% of healthcare executives says revamping the patient experience is one of their organization’s top three priorities over the next five years. Many organizations already have or are building the role of chief patient experience officer. In a few organizations, including Texas Health Resources in Dallas-Fort Worth, this position reports directly to the CEO, says PwC.

Most hospitals and health systems already have patient portals and web tools that help patients perform administrative tasks. For example, 65% of organizations offer a means of paying bills online and 60% offer ways patients and providers can communicate online.

But healthcare organizations need to offer digital tools and programs that better reflect patient priorities, which include how to stay healthy or recover faster after being sick. “2018 will be about making significant strategic investments in patient experience so it changes behavior and improves outcomes—a critical goal as the industry turns toward paying more for value, not volume,” PwC.

Hospitals and health systems, which virtually all take Medicare patients and payments, will be ramping up programs to communicate and serve patients online in response to Medicare changing how it pays providers. Under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), provider reimbursements will be based in part on patient engagement efforts such as promoting self-management and coaching patients between hospital stays and office visits.

Better engagement with patients will require providers to retool how they collect and measure customer service and patient satisfaction, says PwC. “Organizations have traditionally built patient experience efforts around the industry’s satisfaction surveys and measured performance based on satisfaction scores, service volume and revenue,” PwC says. “Though they’re important, these measurements don’t get to the root of what patients value most or what motivates them to get and stay healthy.”

In this regard, PwC, healthcare providers can learn something from retailers, which often collect and analyze data in a variety of ways to get a holistic or “360-degree” view of the customer. To build better digital tools that patients will want and use, the PwC report recommends that hospitals and health systems include supplementing patient demographic data with “profiles with information on the preferences and social circumstances that shape patients’ everyday health decisions.”

For example, the PwC report cites how Humana Healthcare uses analytics to predict a member’s fall risk and help develop interventions that can give these individuals greater independence. “These members might not have ventured outside of their home independently before, because they feared they would have a fall,” says Humana enterprise vice president of clinical analytics at Humana Vipin Gopal. “But now they go out because they have the confidence that someone will be alerted immediately if they do fall, giving them mobility and much needed sense of security.”

Patients generate reams of data about their lives through wearables, pharmaceutical apps and spending habits, but providers say they lack the data to understand different patient segments and struggle to aggregate data from multiple sources, says PwC.

“But 2018 could be the year the health sectors rally around the patient experience by filling each other’s missing links,” PwC says.

Healthcare systems also will make a start toward using artificial intelligence and securing wireless medical devices and the IoT. 39% of healthcare organizations say they are investing in AI, machine learning and predictive analytics, says PwC.

Health businesses are now using artificial intelligence to automate decision-making, create financial and tax reporting efficiencies, automate parts of their supply chains, or streamline regulatory compliance functions. “Tax functions in particular stand to benefit from artificial intelligence and robotic process automation (RPA) to simplify and automate processes once done exclusively by humans, such as interpreting, deciding, acting and learning,” says PwC.

Other top uses of artificial intelligence including developing virtual assistants, better automated data analysis, improved communications through e-mail and chatbots, more streamlined automated research reports and information aggregation and predictive analytics.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) already is disrupting transportation, marketing and financial services, among other sectors,” per the PwC report. “In health, this technology is gaining momentum and has the potential to significantly alter the industry, from the exam room to the back office to the supply chain.”

But perhaps the biggest challenge health systems face is doing a better job at data protection. Many hospitals have thousands of medical devices connected to their networks, but some hospitals, lacking purchasing controls or strict networking rules, don’t even know how many such devices they have, let alone how secure they are, says PwC. For example, only 64% of providers and payers said they have performed a risk assessment of connected devices and technologies to find potential security vulnerabilities, and only 55% of those said they have put security controls in place for these devices, says PwC.

Staff training, too, remains a critical problem with only 31% of healthcare payers and providers planning to train their employees on security practices for the Internet of Things this year and another 31% saying they plan to establish policies for internet-connected devices in 2018, says the PwC report.

“Security failure can mean devices rendered inoperable, critical patient records being stolen or unavailable, and even facilities being shut down as a precaution,” PwC says. “The financial and reputational cost of a breach affecting patient health can far exceed the lost revenue from business disruption.”

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