2021 Accenture Health and Life Sciences Experience Survey

The 2021 Accenture Health and Life Sciences Experience Survey of nearly 1,800 people in the United States reveals how the healthcare experience is changing. The healthcare system showed resilience over this past year and was accessible to many. In fact, 26% of those we surveyed said their access to healthcare has been even better since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital adoption spiked overnight as the entire healthcare industry had to quickly pivot to virtual care. However, we learned that more than one quarter of survey respondents did not use any digital technologies to manage their health in the past year. Growth in digital health technologies adoption had stalled before COVID-19. With some notable exceptions, this year’s data doesn’t show that the plateauing trend is over. Rather than going about business as usual, healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies, and the healthcare ecosystem as a whole, must combine the power of technology and human ingenuity to improve digital adoption, experiences and trust in this new era.

Virtual consultations and electronic health records (EHR) were the top digital technologies used this year. They surged in tandem as one technology (virtual consultations) lifted the use of the other (EHR).