Healthcare organizations are reading the memo that consumers are taking more management of their health and wellness. New research from Accenture reveals that 94% of health executives believe that treating patients and customers as partners is important or very important to gain consumer trust—and so is ensuring the security of consumer data, a trend 92% of executives also say is important to very important.

Emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and virtual reality, among others, will play a big role in driving consumer healthcare forward, Accenture says. But even though healthcare is becoming more digital and accessible to consumers, healthcare companies and organizations still have their work cut out when it comes to implementing new technology. “Think of the implementation like a shark fin,” says Accenture senior managing director for global healthcare business Kaveh Safavi. “It won’t be linear.”

Today, 86% of health executives say their organizations will use data to drive automated decision-making at an unprecedented scale, while 77% expect to invest in IoT and smart sensors this year and 53% expect to invest in artificial intelligence. But 81% of healthcare executives also say they are not yet prepared to face the societal and liability issues needed to explain their AI systems’ decisions, and 86% of healthcare organizations have not yet invested in capabilities to verify the data that feeds into their systems, opening the door to inaccurate, manipulated and biased data—and, therefore, results. “Many health organizations lack the capabilities needed to ensure that their AI and IoT systems act accurately, responsibly and transparently,” Accenture says.

Healthcare organizations expect various emerging technologies to become mainstream within their health system within a few years. Some examples:

• 80% of healthcare executives agree that, within two years, artificial intelligence will work next to humans inside their organizations.
• 83% of executives agree that extended, or virtual, reality will create “a new foundation for interaction, communication and information,” and 72% believe that extended reality will be widespread within five years.
• 89% of health executives agree that as organizations rely on data-driven decisions, the issue of data integrity will grow exponentially.
• 88% of health executives anticipate the volume of data exchanged with other healthcare organizations will increase over the next two years.
• At 91% of healthcare organizations, blockchain and smart contracts will be “critical” for their organization over the next three years.

But emerging technologies will still require health systems of all sizes to spend lots of time and money developing the systems and programs needed for implementation, Safavi says. “There’s going to be a lot of experimentation and issues to sort out,” he says. Among the top challenges are making sure that the data needed to make emerging digital technology possible is both accurate and secure.

For many health systems, better data management and security remain a problem. “AI is only as good as the data used to train it and without establishing the veracity, or accuracy, of data, organizations leave themselves vulnerable,” Accenture says. “Nearly one quarter (24%) of health executives say their organizations have been the target of adversarial AI (such as bot fraud, spoofed sensor or IoT data and falsified location data) multiple times.”

Even with challenges to overcome, health systems are in midst of eventually changing over to newer technology that will be driven in large measure by digital tools and data. “Digital and physical worlds continue to blur in healthcare, emphasizing the need for a stronger, more flexible backbone: extended infrastructure,” Accenture says.

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