Comparison shopping, tech rising in health care
While most consumers say they're ready to make some informed health care choices, that confidence varies between generations.
Finally, some good news for the fight to educate health care consumers. Americans are interested in the role technology can play in their health care, and they’re also doing a lot more comparison shopping for providers—although they still have a way to go when shopping for prescriptions.
Those are among the findings of the fourth-annual UnitedHealthcare Consumer Sentiment Survey, which also finds that while most consumers claim to feel prepared for open enrollment season, that confidence varies from generation to generation—and actually fell two percentage points from a year ago.
Related: 6 tips to eliminate confusion around consumer-directed health care
While 75 percent of consumers overall say they’re prepared to choose a health plan, the generation most confident about it was the Gen Xer group, at 84 percent. Boomers came next, at 78 percent, followed by millennials at 69 percent and trailing far behind, GenZers at just 44 percent.
And among the 19 percent who said they felt unprepared for open enrollment season, they were divided almost evenly between the 10 percent who said they felt “very unprepared” and the 9 percent who just felt “somewhat unprepared.”
Prescription prices are still a mystery to most, tech and transparency notwithstanding, with 64 percent saying they “never” know the price of medications before they leave their doctors’ offices, and 21 percent saying they “sometimes” know. Only 11 percent say they “always” know what those prescriptions will cost them.
Boomers trail the field in the use of technology, with just 14 percent looking to the internet or mobile apps for information on symptoms, conditions or ailments; GenXers, at 22 percent, nearly tied GenZers at 25 percent, while millennials were more reliant on tech, at 30 percent. But health care professionals led the way at 46 percent.
Still, only 39 percent said it was “likely” that they’d use a telemedicine service, assuming they could afford it. And among the 45 percent who said they were interested in their doctors’ use of artificial intelligence to help with diagnosis, 46 percent were after a more accurate diagnosis; 31 percent wanted a reduction in human error; and 15 percent wanted faster treatment decisions
Those uninterested in AI as a diagnostic tool preferred the expertise of a trained health care professional (47 percent) and distrusted the technology (24 percent).
And when it comes to using tech for support in customer service, just don’t. Sixty-six percent said they wanted a live human being to talk to if they needed help. Ten percent were okay with a self-service option by phone or online, 8 percent would use e-mail, 4 percent text, and just 3 percent would use an automated representative by phone.
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