By Liz Leonard
U.S consumers are accustomed to choices. We often take for granted our ability to select products, price points and preferred channels. Why, then, do we as patients expect anything less from our healthcare providers?
Healthcare has not traditionally ranked high on the list of "customer-centric" industries—service level norms have followed more of a "you get what you get" mantra in an HMO-driven health plan system. Illness and injury that prompt a visit to urgent care or the doctor's office typically mean patient inconvenience, long wait times, patient history reconciliations, and usually an abundance of paperwork.
But pressure from consumers is increasingly forcing healthcare providers to act like other industries—putting the patient first and treating patients more like customers. "Patient-centric health" means a variety of things, from patients' ability to select who, how, when, where and how often they access healthcare providers, records and services, along with demanding greater price transparency. Customer service levels expected in other industries are gradually coming to healthcare, allowing the patient more control and flexibility.
The necessity to change has been the mother of healthcare inventions, as several factors pave the way for a new customer-centric norm taking shape in U.S., such as:
• Convenient Clinics: Patients have more choice when it comes to seeking treatment for minor conditions with the onslaught of "minute clinic" options now accessible at local pharmacies. For the price of a co-pay, easy access to care is available to most in the same location as Rx fills, creating new competitive scenarios for primary care offices.
• EHRs and Patient Portals: Digitized health records and online portals improve convenience with features that allow patients to request appointments, send messages to the practice, receive care summaries and engage with physicians on medical care and treatment plans.
• Transparency: Providers are going to face price competition from other provider types, operations will require greater price transparency to payers and patients revealing more of what they are paying for, while there will be an increased correlation between spending for diagnostic testing to patient health outcomes.
• Personalized Medicine: Treatments and prescriptions can be significantly refined to address patients' needs by correlating specific characteristics in disease categories, allowing for improved patient health outcomes and reduced treatment times.
• Call Me Maybe?: Telehealth expansion encompasses all telecommunication channels (phone/video conference, text, e-mail, etc) to promote preventative and curative aspects of healthcare. Physicians can use e-mail or other means to communicate with patients, make prescription recommendations and provide other in-home care services such as remote monitoring of patient conditions or the issuing of proactive reminders to patients, as well as diagnose and treat disease from remote locations.
Putting patients' priorities at the center of the U.S. healthcare ecosystem is long overdue, representing a challenge for providers. As one hospital CEO says: "Our number one goal is to continue our transformation away from being a transaction-focused system to one that is driven to create better outcomes through the eyes of the patient."
Liz Leonard is Associate Director and Lead, Healthcare Consulting for Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory. For more information, visit www.kennedyinfo.com/consulting.
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