The trend: Almost half (49%) of healthcare leaders say the patient experience is their organization’s top strategic priority through 2027, per a new Sage Growth Partners’ report. Sage surveyed 101 healthcare system and hospital C-suite executives about AI during Q2.

• Healthcare C-suite leaders are prioritizing improving the patient experience more than staff recruitment and retention or patient safety for the first time since Sage began tracking this in 2020.
• Healthcare leaders’ focus on improving the patient experience has increased steadily: 36% called this a priority in 2023, compared with 25% in 2022, and just 14% in 2020.

Why it matters: Healthcare leaders are betting on digital health technology and virtual care solutions to achieve patient goals, but also need to manage returns on investment.

• 83% of the C-suite leaders agree that underlying digital tools will be important in improving the overall patient experience.
• Specifically, telehealth (50%) and remote patient monitoring (47%) are leading digital initiatives for the next two years.
• 49% of the healthcare leaders said AI will be important in helping them improve the patient experience. 81% say AI will play a key role in remote patient monitoring, and 71% agreed AI will help expand virtual care.

Generating a return on virtual care investments has been challenging. More than half of healthcare leaders did report at least some ROI gains across a range of services, including remote monitoring, virtual care visits, and hospital-at-home care. ROI varied by service offered, but only one—virtual emergency room triage—broke even or better.

Implications for healthcare: Healthcare leaders are prioritizing the patient experience because digital and virtual tools now offer ways to improve it, such as simplifying scheduling, communication, and patient care navigation.

They’re adopting commercial AI solutions at more than twice the rate of the rest of the US economy, in part because it allows them to move faster to achieve their goals of improving the patient experience. For example, AI can turn patient monitoring data into personalized care plans, adherence prompts, and timely interventions. While the ROI on virtual care investments is still uneven, healthcare systems that delay digital modernization risk losing ground to competitors that offer more engaging, data-driven patient experiences.