Verizon-Harvard Survey Reveals Special Challenges In Healthcare Vertical

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Verizon has recently released a cross-vertical survey in conjunction with the Harvard Business Review that examines industries and their attitudes around early technology adoption.

The Digital Dividend: First Move Advantage surveyed 672 businesses, of which 74 were from the healthcare vertical. The survey included international respondents and examined the impact of “The Big Five Technologies” of mobile, social, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and machine-to-machine communications.

The survey revealed some trends in the healthcare industry that give important insight into your clients’ attitudes about the tech solutions you offer.

Adopting New Technology

Surprisingly, attitudes around adopting new technology in the healthcare sector mirrored distribution across the entire survey. Respondents fell evenly between the categories of “pioneers,” “followers,” and “cautious.” This indicates that you will need to stay in tune with individual client attitudes to discover where they fall on the spectrum.

The iPhone Effect

The executives surveyed also indicated that the proliferation of the first smartphone has changed the way users expect other mobile devices to function. The CFO of an Italian hearing aid manufacturer indicated that he was seeing similar expectations in his sector: “Products need to be easy to use, without any issues.”

That doesn’t stop with physical devices though — the expectation extends into services. A shift in customer expectations was the top change-driver for the healthcare sector (as indicated by 57 percent of respondents), just ahead of increased regulation.

Healthcare Fears

Though not indicated in this specific survey, one of the primary reasons healthcare overall has been reluctant to adopt many technologies, has been issues around security, and the much more serious implications breaches and weaknesses have for the industry.

The recent breach at Community Health Systems was a stark reminder of just how vulnerable your client data is to outside threats. Even the FBI has warned that the healthcare industry specifically is not as well prepared as other industries, despite the wealth of data that it processes, stores, and collects.

For more on what your healthcare clients need from IT solutions providers, read “Are You Targeting Healthcare IT’s Biggest Pain Points?”