How do patients help themselves?
If the United States health system is less than ideal, it is ultimately patients that suffer. If our system of healthcare and payment is improved, is it the patient – the consumer – who will play the most important role in changing it?
As a hospital and healthcare system executive for more than 20 years, I have come to believe that meaningful, positive change in our industry will be driven by individuals. Given a variety of forces now in play – political, economic, social and technological – I believe that we are at the early stages of a revolution in healthcare.
I am writing this blog to learn how it will work. Through my work and professional interests, I am continually aware of what might be early breakthroughs or setbacks for this revolution. However, I don’t have all of the answers, or even a strong feeling about which approaches are best.
Many names and evolved philosophies on these healthcare issues already exist – empowered patients, Consumer-Directed Healthcare, Smart Patient, the e-patient movement. All are important and fascinating. The combined energy of these efforts and others seems too massive and evolving to try to name, so I won’t.
Despite my years in the industry, including time spent as the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for a healthcare trade magazine, I am not an expert regarding this change. I am a very interested observer with a unique perspective and, perhaps, unusual insights and access to ask the right questions.
Among the questions that intrigue me most:
- How does our current healthcare system fail to serve patients (and consumers)?
- How are patients finding ways to fill these gaps in service?
- How will these new roles that patients are assuming forever change healthcare?
Join me as I chronicle this journey, which I expect will lead to a dramatically modified health system that, while perhaps not perfect, will be fundamentally improved to better serve the interests and needs of patients.
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3 Comments
Bravo! It’s great to see a key player, beyond the Plan Managers, Politician and Pundit circles, leaning into the Healthcare Consumerism issue. While the wheels of Healthcare Reform tenuously turn, it’s hard to know exactly what will come out the other end (and/or whether it will strips its gears along the way). But, whichever scenario(s) plays out, Healthcare Consumerism is likely to play a role.
For one approach in the interim, folks like NuuKo are developing methods and Ron Bachman has assembled an information “navigator”
Finally, I’d be more than interested in any reactions to this same topic on my own blog at http://silverbulleits.typepad.com/dcs/2011/07/whither-heathcare-consumerism-whether-it-withers-or-weathers.html
Oops! `forgot to supply links to the sites referenced above
http://www.NuuKo.com
https://sites.google.com/site/healthreformnavigatorhome/home
I have long felt that the concept of “Consumerism” in healthcare is overblown and overstated. While it is true that an increasing amount of information is available on-line to consumers, the value or validity of such information is highly variable, and only the small fraction of the population that may fall into the demonized category of “intellectual elite” can even begin to decipher it. Even armed with such information, it still requires 4 years of medical school to become a physician. As my wife’s lengthy battle with Fibromyalgia, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Raynaud’s Syndrome, Vasculitis, and the medical profession demonstrates, such information can help provide extremely intelligent individuals some ability to help navigate the system and be their own advocates in seeking the best care and that’s about it. The vast majority of the population may gain enough insight to ask their physician a few extra questions; but producing a major revolution in healthcare in the future; I highly doubt it.
As I am sure we will discuss in more detail in future blogs, people (and organizations) rarely, if ever, behave in ways contrary to the ways in which they have incentive to behave, and that incentive is most often and most effective when it is financial in nature. Currently, there is no single component of or player in the US Health System with an incentive to do the one thing sure to redcuce the cost of health care in this country – keep people healthy. Surely, individuals are not (financially) incented to do so. Nor is any medical care provider, who are each paid when they admit a patient; see a patient; order a scan or test, etc. The only players with any incentive whatsoever are employers, and they are often too motivated by short-term earnings requirements to follow through on health care initiatives, which are, by definition, long-term propositions. So, where does all of this leave us? Stay tuned to Ed’s blog.