As if the trauma of integrating electronic health records weren’t bad enough, now the medical profession faces an even more difficult transition: regarding patients as consumers.
This latest affront to the profession—one that affects medical insurers as well—comes as a direct result of the national effort to encourage people to take greater control of their medical care. Obamacare made citizens aware that they had choices and challenged them to educate themselves. Suddenly, yesterday’s patient became tomorrow’s potential customer.
A recent Modern Healthcare survey—the CEO Power Panel—recognized this new focus on consumerism and asked respondents detailed questions about how they are positioning themselves as consumer-facing businesses.
Much like the profession’s reluctant adoption of EHR, medicine’s shift toward consumerism has been in general slow, cautious and kind of all over the place, the survey found.
On the other hand, insurers have made greater strides in that direction, according to the survey. But then, they had to. Obamacare’s focus on transparency and choices in coverage quickly forced insurers to recast their products and rethink their customers.
Regardless of what the medical profession may think of this shift toward consumerism, those high-ranking executives interviewed clearly understand the need to view patients as consumers. When asked how quickly consumerism was growing in health care, more than half said “rapidly” and another quarter said “as fast as the rest of health care.”
When asked about the importance of having someone in senior management with consumer experience outside of health care, 30 percent said “very important and nearly 10 percent said “vital.” Only about 4 percent dismissed the concept as completely unimportant.
The survey revealed that health care organizations are still in the early stages of consumer awareness. When asked to list their priorities for making a shift toward consumerism, 40 percent said they were focused primarily on eliciting consumer satisfaction information and general feedback on how well they were responding to consumers. Coming in a distant second place, at 19 percent, was offering consumers greater convenience. Dead last, at 5 percent: Greater price transparency with consumers.
When asked what consumerism initiatives they planned to implement over the next three to five years, respondents overwhelmingly (60 percent) selected “expand online services. They showed little interest in linking patient-generated health data with a patient’s EHR (9 percent) and only modest interest in expanding clinic hours to accommodate patients and offering “patient-friendly billing practices,” both at 15 percent.
But that may all change if and when more health care companies appoint a Chief Consumer Officer to lead the internal evolution. Currently, just 31 percent said they had a single executive in charge of consumerism, and only 24 percent had a Chief Consumer Officer. But, with 87 percent saying they are now training all employees to be more consumer conscious, it appears inevitable that more companies will decide to accelerate their consumer reorientation by putting someone in charge of the initiative.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
