KPMG: Healthcare Leaders Bullish on Deploying AI for COVID-19 Tracking, Vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, but many in the industry say it’s moving too fast, according to a new multi-sector KPMG survey. However, despite concerns about the speed of adoption, business leaders are confident AI can help solve some of today’s toughest challenges, including COVID-19 tracking and vaccines.

The KPMG study, “Thriving in an AI World,” is an evolution of a study KPMG originally released in early 2020. The findings are based on feedback from a range of 950 full-time business decision makers and/or IT decision makers, with at least a moderate amount of AI knowledge and at companies with over $1 billion in revenue, across seven industries: technology, financial services, industrial manufacturing, healthcare, life sciences, retail, and government. The respondents included 100 individuals from healthcare and 100 from life sciences, respectively.

Business leaders from both small (88 percent) and large (80 percent) companies said AI technology has helped their company during the COVID-19 outbreak. As KPMG analysts continue to navigate the pandemic, they note that life sciences and healthcare business leaders are overwhelmingly confident in AI’s ability to monitor the spread of COVID-19 cases (94 percent and 91 percent), help with vaccine development (90 percent and 94 percent) and distribution (90 percent and 88 percent), respectively.

Further, over 8 in 10 respondents from the healthcare and life science sectors, respectively, said they either somewhat or strongly agree that they wish my business would more aggressively adopt AI technology. Only 18 percent from each industry disagreed with that statement.

When asked where their organization is currently focusing its AI investments on, 39 percent of healthcare-specific respondents said electronic health record (EHR) management, with 32 percent reporting for diagnosis and 30 percent for telehealth. However, while healthcare respondents say their current top AI investment is electronic health record management, these investments will shift over the next two years to prioritize telehealth (38 percent), robotic tasks (37 percent), and delivery of patient care (36 percent), according to the research,

What’s more, reduced errors and improved medical outcomes for patients (44 percent for each) are among the top ways in which AI has added value to healthcare organizations, the survey data revealed. Greater patient engagement, improved clinical quality, greater clinical efficiency, and improved administrative efficiency were the next highest responses for this question about value.

On the life science side, respondents said that AI is primarily deployed during record keeping/the application process of the drug development process at their organization (52 percent), followed by clinical trial site selection (43 percent) and discovery (40 percent).

Similarly, a report released last fall from the Center for Connected Medicine (CCM) at the Pittsburgh-based UPMC health system, along with KLAS Research, also revealed that health systems quickly turned their attention to rapidly deploying AI in response to the pandemic. That report found that half of respondents said they were using AI in response to the pandemic for applications such as clinical decision support, management of beds, staffing and devices, and analytics—experience that is boosting interest in the technology and pointing to greater utilization in the year ahead. Additionally, a majority of respondents said their organizations are using 20 percent or less of their healthcare data to inform AI applications, suggesting health systems need to do more to standardize and share their data.

According to Traci Gusher, principal of artificial intelligence, “Leaders are experiencing COVID-19 whiplash, with AI adoption skyrocketing as a result of the pandemic. But many say it’s moving too fast. That’s probably because of current debate surrounding the ethics, governance and regulation of AI. Many business leaders do not have a view into what their organizations are doing to control and govern AI and may fear risks are developing.”

Going back to the KPMG research, business leaders across industries also believe the Biden administration will do more to help advance the adoption of AI in the enterprise: industrial manufacturing (90 percent), tech (88 percent), retail (85 percent), financial services (82 percent), life sciences (81 percent), government (79 percent) and healthcare (73 percent).

Even with the optimism, business leaders are conscious that controls are needed and overwhelmingly believe the government has a role to play in regulating AI technology: industrial manufacturing (94 percent), retail (87 percent), financial services (86 percent), life sciences (86 percent), tech (86 percent), healthcare (84 percent) and government (82 percent). Business leaders with high AI knowledge (92 percent) are more likely to say the government should be involved in regulating AI technology in comparison to total business leaders (87 percent).

“We are seeing very high levels of support this year across all industries for more AI regulation. One reason for this may be that, as the technology advances very quickly, insiders want to avoid AI becoming the ‘Wild Wild West.’ Additionally, a more robust regulatory environment may help facilitate commerce. It can help remove unintended barriers that may be the result of other laws or regulations, or due to lack of maturity of legal and technical standards,” said Rob Dwyer, principal, advisory, specializing in technology in government.

A separate report, from healthcare market research and consulting firm Sage Growth Partners and AI solutions company Olive, additionally found that 75 percent of respondents believe strategic initiatives around AI and automation are more important or significantly more important in 2021 since the pandemic.

For this research, survey respondents included 100 leaders of healthcare organizations with annual revenues exceeding $800 million, 76 percent of whom were C-level executives.

The survey revealed that healthcare executives are increasingly prioritizing automation technologies in their hospitals, and they're already seeing ROI through reduced costs:

76 percent of respondents said automation has elevated in importance because cutting wasteful spending will help them recuperate and grow faster
90 percent have an AI/automation strategy in place, up from 53 percent in Q3 2019
More than half (56 percent) reported ROIs of 2x or higher on their automation technologies

At the same time, despite seeking out automation solutions and getting a strategy in place, scaling and implementation remain to be challenges, according to the survey data:

Only 7 percent of hospital's AI strategies are fully operational
Just 6 percent of respondents cited having 10 or more use cases live across their organization
44 percent of respondents cited resource constraints (e.g. not enough staff to support implementation) and difficulty identifying best processes for automation as their top two implementation challenges