Accenture researchers project that healthcare organizations can save a collective $60 billion by making strategic investments in digital technologies.

Accenture’s report follows one from technology consultancy IDC that estimated the worldwide market for digital transformation will surpass $20 trillion in the short-term.

IDC focused on 14 verticals, among which a mere 5 percent of companies have completed a digital transformation, while Accenture looked at the cost-savings potential.

Accenture’s “Digital Affectability: Quantifying the Economic Impact of Digital Assets” report, which the group released Wednesday, pinpointed a half-dozen therapeutic areas ripe for significant savings: Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, congestive heart failure, diabetes, HIV and multiple myeloma. The diseases, taken together, affect about 50 million Americans. 

Accenture also found that $2 billion in spending could be avoided every year by using technologies to predict and more effectively manage congestive heart failure and, likewise, diagnosing Alzheimer’s early can yield significant savings.

“We’ve found that the highest-impact digital opportunities often lie outside the chronic, high-prevalence diseases that receive the most investment attention,” the report authors wrote. “Our analyses showed that 50 percent of system costs can be prevented by targeting investments to rarer, specialized disease states with lower prevalence.” 

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