What is digital maturity?

Digital maturity is a healthcare organization's ability to integrate digital technologies across its operational, patient engagement, and decision-making processes.

Digital maturity means adopting beyond digital tools — transforming the entire enterprise to operate in a digitally optimized way.

Rising consumer expectations, shaped by industries like retail and banking, make digital maturity essential for healthcare organizations. Today's patients demand seamless, personalized, and multichannel digital experiences. Digital maturity is an ongoing process that organizations should assess every few years as the landscape evolves. Recurring assessments clarify where your organization needs to head next and enables better capital planning to support your health system’s journey towards digital maturity.

What's visible to patients above the surface — like digital interfaces — is only a small part of what's required below the surface to support those capabilities. Health systems require robust governance, EHR-centered infrastructure, and a commitment to system-wide consistency.

We outline three progressive stages of digital maturity:

• Just using: Organizations deploy digital technologies to extend capabilities but retain largely traditional business, operating, and customer models. Organizations in this stage adopt digital point solutions for specific problems.
• Cohesively integrated: Organizations synchronize digital technologies across the enterprise, reducing silos and enabling more advanced operational and engagement models. One example for organizations in this stage is integrating EHR solutions with financial and workforce technologies to support staffing.
• Fully transformed: The organization's business, operating, and customer models are fundamentally reimagined and optimized for the digital era.

How organizations feel about their digital maturity — and where they want to go

At two recent Advisory Board summits, health system and hospital leaders participated in a digital maturity poll that assessed their current state and aspirations across key domains. The results reveal a clear story: most organizations recognize they are not yet where they want to be, and they're eager to evolve.

Specifically, over half of respondents said their organizations are "just using" digital technologies while only 5% considered themselves "fully transformed." Yet more than half of respondents said they want to be "fully transformed" within three to five years while just under half said they want to be "cohesively integrated."

The survey results were consistent across a variety of domains: governance such as investment tracking, IT functionality, data usage, and feedback responsiveness.

Furthermore, fewer than 40% said they were "cohesively integrated" or better for optimizing the value of investment and standardization across the entire organization.

This suggests that the biggest gap for digital executives could be the same gaps that appear in other strategic initiatives, including understanding the investment cycle and standardization across the organization.

How to move toward digital maturity

Health systems and health plans need to work across strategic and technical domains to push toward digital maturity. To get started, they must: