Leading The Digital Revolution: The Work Ahead

Robert Hoyle Brown is an Associate Vice-President in Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and drives strategy and market outreach for Cognizant’s Business Process Services business unit. He is also a regular contributor to the blog www.Futureofwork.com.

Recently, Brown took time to speak with Health IT Outcomes about the digital revolution, how it will benefit healthcare, and what the future holds for the emerging technology

Q: What is the digital revolution and how will it benefit healthcare?

Brown: A new economy — a digital economy — is emerging from the technological innovation. An economy based on platforms and algorithms and “things” and “bots” is taking shape and, in the process, generating huge new money from ideas that represent the future.

Digital is more than technology — it is rapid innovation to connect technology, data science, devices, design, and business strategy, as well as people, to change a business process or customer experience. Digital puts the customer, device, organization or business process at the center of real change that improves agility, revenue, and costs. Digital means creating value by connecting the physical world to the digital, or code, world.

The Cognizant Center for the Future of Work surveys senior executives at 348 healthcare payers and providers, which forecasts a huge amount of work ahead in their digital strategies. While mastering digital will be beneficial for payers and providers, it will also drive a renaissance in how we and future generations stay healthy and thrive in the 21st century. The executives we surveyed know big changes are coming by the end of the decade, but it’s unclear exactly how the industry will harness digital to get from now to 2020. New approaches like telemedicine, robotic-assisted surgery, and AI-augmented diagnosis and prevention will be required to drive the boosts in digitally-driven revenue growth envisioned by industry executives.

Q: Digital initiatives, according to your own research, have increased healthcare costs 0.7 percent during the last year. What’s the flip side to that, both short and long term? And will costs continue to rise, or can digitization eventually reduce them?

Brown: Digital has improved organizations’ revenues by 5.2 percent during the same period. Through 2018, the cost picture for healthcare respondents does improve. Costs are expected to decrease by 2.4 percent. What’s more, respondents expect to directly boost their 2018 top-line revenues using digital by 8.6 percent. Adding the aforementioned cost reduction estimates, that’s an 11 percent improvement to the top and bottom lines by 2018 — essentially a doubling from today’s revenue impact of 5.2 percent.

Q: How far along is healthcare as a whole down the digital revolution road?

Brown: Evidence suggests symptoms of magical thinking: only about 10 percent of payers and providers feel their organizations are either “far ahead” (or even “moderately ahead”) of peers in other industries in applying digital technologies. In other words, a strong majority — 70 percent — feel they’re mediocre and just on par with peers.

Perhaps there is something of a digital delusion playing out, because by 2018 the outlook is radically changed with approximately 60 percent of respondents believing they’ll be ahead of their peers by then. Deluded or not, payers that want to thrive — let alone survive –will need to aggressively embrace new digital business models.

What’s the cost of inaction? Being worse than your peer group comes with a high economic price. Companies behind the curve are paying a large annual Laggard Penalty — the difference in both cost and revenue performance due to technology. And over time, it’s enough to change the company.

Take healthcare Payers, for example. If they haven’t led with digital, chances are they’ve left an average of about $145 million on the table in the last fiscal year. That’s bad enough, but the Laggard Penalty grows like a weed over time. By 2018, that Laggard Penalty for Payers will grow to an average of $1.65 billion. Like money owed to a loan shark, the penalty is more than you probably imagine, and the amount charged by a bookmaker accrues quickly over time. Editor’s note: these numbers are derived from the 186 healthcare payers in Cognizant’s respondent base, with an average firm size of $5.1 billion in annual revenue. Again, the penalty may vary depending on industry, level of digital maturity, region and other particulars.

Q: In what ways can healthcare improve over the next five years by harnessing digital?

Brown: By 2020, the whole concept of healthcare will be quite different. For one, the notion of a digital house call will be more mainstream. Already, the number of virtual physician visits is growing as rapidly as reimbursement and state regulations will allow. High-tech, high-touch processes will enable physicians and other clinicians to do what they do best.

As such, we asked payers and providers what healthcare work will look like in 2020. The top response — among 78 percent of providers and 74 percent of payers — was the ability to use digital to “contribute more meaningfully,” be it making patients feel better, knowing critical coverage did not slip through the cracks of a bad process handoff or saving the lives of at-risk individuals through better digital information.

Significantly, nearly three-fifths of providers (59 percent) feel it is urgent for their organizations to use digital to improve communication with colleagues (watch any gritty episode of Grey’s Anatomy with the cast shouting medical lingo at each other, and you’ll get the idea), as well as enhance work satisfaction (58 percent). Both of these presumably operate in tandem to buttress and support the leading objective of contributing more meaningfully.

At the same time, trends such as healthcare consumerism and personalization of care are driving the industry to master digital in order to reshape and transform with the customer at the center. By 2020, both payers and providers seem to be striving to see work as less of a process and more of a mission to prevent illness and provide chronic care management.

Q: Automation, bots, and AI are three influencers driving the digital revolution. What role the these technologies currently play and how will those roles expand over the next five years?

Brown: All of these technologies, respondents believe, will force their employees (and themselves) to make greater strategic contributions to work and amplify their ability to collaborate with others.

Analytics and AI are the top two digital forces respondents say will have either moderate or strong impact on the work of healthcare by 2020. Virtually all providers (100 percent) and payers (98 percent) said it was either moderately or very likely automation would be the leading digital force transforming work, as it would make work more strategic as tasks become automated. Providers also emphasized automation would require greater technical expertise (95 percent) and greater collaboration with other workers (92 percent). Most payers (94 percent), meanwhile, believe workers will collaborate with smart machines to augment job effectiveness, clearly paving the way for the interplay of smart machines and humans to an ever-greater degree.

In short, the era of “the doctor and the bot” is at our doorstep.