About 95% of healthcare providers and payers rank software and digital technology among their five highest strategic priorities, with most expecting to increase spending, according to research from Bain & Company and KLAS Research published Sept. 23.
The findings come from a survey of 303 U.S. healthcare executives. For the first time, the research analyzed independent physician groups, or ambulatory providers, as a distinct group alongside health systems and payers.
Here are nine key findings from the survey:
- The growing investment comes with greater expectations for financial returns. Healthcare executives increasingly want technology investments tied to specific use cases, measurable returns and a short time to value, the report said. Limited IT resources and competing priorities remain the primary barriers to technology deployment and achieving results.
- Revenue cycle management remains a critical investment priority for both acute and ambulatory providers. Health systems are also focusing investments on clinical workflow optimization, including ambient documentation, clinical decision support and patient flow and bed management. For ambulatory groups, patient access and engagement ranked as the highest priority.
- The research also suggests most acute providers do not expect generative AI to reduce the difficulty of switching EHRs. Nearly 80% of acute provider organizations surveyed said advances in generative AI would either increase their EHR switching costs or have no effect on them.
- Providers also continue to favor EHR-native technology, particularly for tools closely connected to clinical workflows. The report said integrated suites can reduce the burden of maintaining third-party integrations and help organizations spread the upfront costs of EHR implementation across more capabilities.
- AI adoption, meanwhile, is moving further from experimentation toward expectations for measurable returns. About 75% of provider respondents described themselves as optimistic or highly optimistic about AI, with ambient documentation, chart summarization and clinical documentation improvement among the leading use cases.
- Bain and KLAS said ambient documentation is beginning to produce financial returns beyond physician well-being, pointing to examples in which organizations reported increased patient throughput. One chief health analytics officer at a community health system said documentation time among top users of its ambient listening technology fell 50% to 60%, while the number of patients seen increased 18.4% about a year after adoption.
- Payers are also reporting early returns from AI, particularly in labor-intensive workflows. More than 60% of payers reported having AI in pilot or full rollout for call center operations, and about 60% said those investments were meeting or exceeding their ROI expectations.
- Still, cost and accuracy remain the primary barriers to scaling AI among providers. Many organizations do not have a formal threshold for returns on AI investments, according to the report. Among those that do, the most common target is a return of 3 to 3.9 times the original investment.
- For payers, technology investment remains concentrated in member care coordination and utilization management, member and care navigation, and claims processing. The report said limited internal resources, technical debt and competing priorities remain bigger barriers to deployment than vendor or technology limitations.
