As the Metaverse expands, businesses are looking for new ways to improve the customer experience. The same could be said for those in the healthcare sector, as the Metaverse can bring even more when it comes to healthcare innovation.

We continue to live in an increasingly programmable world, where control, customization and automation will be embedded in the environment around us. Accenture experts understand that the programmable world is about building the next version of the physical world in healthcare, understanding the complex layers to fully utilize the technology to its maximum effect. They describe this process as the “Metaverse Continuum.”

Related: What is Accenture’s Metaverse Continuum group?

Momentum for change has also been shown, with 80% of healthcare executives saying the number of IoT/edge devices deployed in their organizations has increased significantly or exponentially in the last three years. 97% of healthcare executives also believe that ongoing technological advances are more reliable than economic, political or social trends in informing their organization’s long-term strategy.

Accenture’s digital health technology vision survey surveyed 391 healthcare executives from ten countries to learn their perspectives on healthcare innovation and its relationship to the metaverse. The impressions of 24,000 citizens around the world were also taken, analyzing their use of technology, their interactions with it and their beliefs about it.

The survey reinforced the crucial point that the “Metaverse Continuum” is a spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities and business models poised to revolutionize life and business, and that this is key to advancing better healthcare solutions.

The research also highlighted four distinct trends that show how technological innovations are shaping the healthcare experiences of the future:

• WebMe: is a technology that illustrates how the Internet is being reimagined with the Metaverse as the experience layer and Web3 as the new distributed data layer.
• the programmable world: Shows how technology is threading through physical environments in three layers: Connected, Experiential, and Material. Connected is the creation of a connected, experiential foundation builds on the core layer with new developments and material makes up the physical construction.
• the unreal: Explore the “unreal” qualities that are becoming intrinsic to artificial intelligence, and even data, making the synthetic seem passably authentic.
• compute the impossible: Outlines the outer limit of what is computationally possible as a new class of computing machines emerges with a new computing power curve to tackle big challenges.

Although these new innovations are revolutionary, they are not without their challenges. Most health organizations are not going to develop this type of technology internally, so there may be access and operational problems.

The introduction of many more connected and smart devices also creates new entry points that connect our physical and digital worlds, bringing added complexities and risks. Each entry point opens up possibilities for innovation and new types of experiences for patients, but each also creates security concerns. Data security is vital in the healthcare sector, and it is important that this is taken into account when understanding metaverse technology.

It is also noted that to become a healthcare leader in the programmable world, organizations will need to explore, experiment and develop across all three layers (connected, experiential and material) and work towards full stack programmability.

As we continue to move through times of rapid change, it is clear that many healthcare providers will be wondering what their organization’s role is in this new continuum. A new arena for healthcare innovation and competition is emerging, and if companies are prepared to harness the full power of the Metaverse and use it correctly, it will ultimately deliver better results for everyone involved.

Accenture has a deep understanding of the Metaverse Continuum, and you can learn more about its Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2022 here.