State of Digital Health Purchasing 2024 Survey
Problem
Health care purchasers struggle to identify effective digital health solutions amid rapid market growth.
The U.S. digital health market is experiencing significant growth, with projections showing a 16.3 percent compound annual growth rate from 2024 to 2030. This expansion presents opportunities to transform health care delivery and improve public health through early detection, prevention, and enhanced chronic illness management. However, the rapid pace of innovation and increasing demand are creating additional challenges for decision-makers responsible for purchasing digital health solutions at health plans, employers, and health systems who already face substantial difficulties in determining which solutions can help them achieve their organizational goals. Key challenges include:
- An overwhelming number of available technologies
- Unclear effectiveness data
- The need to manage diverse stakeholder priorities
- Evolving decision-making processes within purchasing organizations
The Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) recognized the need to better understand and track how purchasers navigate these challenges.
Solution
NORC co-designed and conducted a comprehensive survey of digital health purchasers.
PHTI commissioned and collaborated with NORC to develop and implement a strategic survey targeting digital health purchasing decision-makers from health systems, employers, and health plans. Our survey was carefully crafted to capture meaningful data about purchasing processes, priorities, and challenges. We strategically tailored it to audiences in specific digital health purchasing roles and levels of relevant decision-making authority. A total of 332 respondents met our screening criteria, including representatives from 100 health systems, 115 health plans, and 117 employers. Our online survey was accessible from all digital devices and ran July 16–August 18, 2024.
To ensure quality, we cleaned and validated our data to eliminate invalid responses. We analyzed responses using column proportion tests to compare results across groups of interest, using a 95 percent confidence interval.
Result
Increased consumer demand and other factors are driving significant changes in digital health purchasing.
Our survey uncovered several significant findings about the digital health purchasing landscape:
- Spending on digital health solutions increased from 2022 to 2024, driven by consumer demand (83 percent) and improved outcomes from digital health solutions (62 percent).
- The most common clinical indications targeted by purchasers include diabetes (65 percent), primary care (62 percent), and mental health (56 percent).
- Most purchasers planned to increase their digital health spending within the year and expressed a strong interest in adopting risk-based contracts and expanding their digital health offerings.
These findings provide valuable insights for stakeholders across the health care industry and establish a baseline for tracking the evolution of digital health purchasing practices.
