Healthcare has long been know to lag behind other sectors of the economy when it comes to the introduction of new IT, and despite the array of digital technologies that have come onto the market in recent years, that habit continues.

That’s according to a recent survey of physicians and consumers by accounting firm Ernst & Young, which found that only 32 percent of U.S. physicians and 27 percent of U.S. consumers rated their healthcare system as performing well in terms of introducing digital technologies.

For the survey, Ernst & Young polled more than 8,500 consumers and 650 physicians in four countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands.

Of the physicians surveyed, more than half predicted that digital healthcare technologies will become commonplace in the next decade, and sixty percent said that digital technologies will enable care teams to remotely coordinate complex care. The same percentage predicted companies outside of healthcare will enter the industry and bring profoundly different ways of management care, and 56 percent said that artificial intelligence technologies will be commonly used for diagnosis, medical imaging analysis, and medication management.

Still, it won’t happen overnight.

“A change in attitude, maybe that is culture, across the healthcare ecosystem is vital,” said David Roberts, Ernst & Young global health sector leader, in a statement. “Health organizations need to become more agile and look to build, buy or partner on solutions that bring the organization up to speed. Healthcare organizations and health systems contemplating change will need to weigh three conditions that are necessary to achieve this — creating an overarching strategy of digital transformation, optimizing performance through agile business transformation and pursuing deep-seated cultural change.”

When asked about the myriad ways digital technologies are apt to change the delivery of healthcare, 55 percent of physicians said that smartphones will become the primary interface in the healthcare system, while 32 percent said that virtual hospitals with no beds will deliver basic and advanced care.

In addition, 49 percent said that precision medicine will be a routine aspect of preventive primary care.  And when it comes to AI, the report noted that “health systems of the future are expected to be smart: connected to deliver operational efficiency and clinical excellence in a patient-centric model. Smart means that algorithms (analytics, machine learning and other AI technologies) and robotic process automation (RPA) tame the wave of user-generated and clinical data.”

And pointing to the inevitable connection to data,  Aloha McBride, Ernst & Young global health advisory leader, explained,  “Care requires frictionless, but permission-guided, data sharing among stakeholders – whether they are consumers, who are increasingly recognized as owners of the data, or businesses that provide the tools capturing the data. Data sharing necessitates a health IT platform that allows for the storage and linkage of structured and unstructured data; the data has to exist independently of the applications that generate it; and the data must be accessible by a variety of interfaces.”