KPMG healthcare industry technology insights report

Digital to the core

In May and June 2022, KPMG U.S. surveyed 1,052 U.S.-based, executive-level technology leaders across eight broad industry sectors. The 2022 KPMG U.S. Technology Survey Report covers the current state of their organization’s digital transformation journey, the challenges they are facing along that journey and their planned technology investments. This healthcare industry report highlights the most significant differences in the survey findings for the 100 technology leaders in the healthcare sector relative to all sectors represented in the survey.

Key findings

Healthcare organizations report good results from their digital transformation initiatives, particularly around automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But they’re eager get more from their spending on technology by accelerating agility, amplifying customer centricity, and creating new value.

Here are a few highlights:

Healthcare executives struggle with some aspects of digital transformation…

• 52% conceded their organization's cyber security strategy is proceeding slower than expected
• 40% cite the complexity of operation technology and industrial control systems as a big cyber security challenge

…In other areas, they’ve had good results for the money spent

• 53% devote less than 10% of the budget to technology
• 59% have been very or extremely effective in using digital technology to advance their business strategy
• 24% say digital transformation has produced gains of more than 10% in profitably or performance

Healthcare executives are more likely than those in other industries to be proactive in their digital strategy

• AI & automation (54% versus 40% of all organizations)
• Cloud (62% versus 48%)
• Data & analytics (62% versus 51%)
• Digital transformation (63% versus 44%)

They’re more likely than most to have generated a positive ROI in:

• Robotic process automation (60% versus 50% of all organizations)
• Vision systems (38% versus 30%)
• Machine learning (90% versus 82%)
• Natural language processing (65% versus 61%)

In other areas of digital transformation, healthcare organizations are ahead compared to all industries….

• Fewer find their cloud agenda suffering from a lack of funding or lack of a business case (7% vs. 17%)
• More say improving system reliability or resilience is a top-three benefit of their cloud program (34% vs. 22%)
• They’ll invest more in AI/ML over the next 12 months (60% vs. 48%)
• More plan for AI/ML to remain a key area of investment (58% vs. 50%) 

They say they invest in enterprise technology more for value than others

• Invest to create new value (32% vs. 22%)
• Invest to amplify customer centricity (32% vs. 46%)
• Invest to improve agility (45% vs. 42%)