The Advisory Board recently published a study done with 4000 healthcare consumers, asking them what they want from primary care. The study ranks 56 dimensions of healthcare opinion, and can be accessed as a PDF here: http://www.advisory.com
I will summarize for you their 10 insights:
- Convenience is king.
- Same-day appointments trump walk-in and wait.
- Evening or weekends? Depends on age.
- Clinic near errands or work? They’d rather meet you online.
- A one-stop shop is worth the drive.
- Consumers prioritize convenience over credentials—and over continuity.
- High-tech beats high-quality.
- Don’t rely on your brand.
- Talk about money—consumers will trade access for bill info.
- Know your target population, particularly their age.
The Advisory Board’s study is one example of what a big subject healthcare consumerism has become in online journals and newsletters. I have been interested to see that it is being treated in a much more practical way than patient satisfaction and quality data as they have evolved over the last thirty years in the technical forms of HEDIS, HCAHP, CG CAHPS and Press Ganey survey reports. I am not sure how many doctors understand these tools or even know that the “C” in HCAHP stands for “consumer.”
Most physicians have been able to ignore this data as it has steadily grown in importance over the last few decades while they focused on another new term that was emerging which had a much more direct impact on the fundamentals of their compensation, the “relative value unit” or RVU. The relative value unit is a major misnomer since, in its practical application, it has become quite different from the original intent. Now it is “the relative volume unit” of FFS volume-based reimbursement.
In retrospect it is interesting to see that while our special and often self-serving definitions of professionalism caused us to cringe at concepts of consumerism, we have resisted any attempts to introduce consumer- or service-oriented activities like answering patient requests through electronic patient portals into our daily work flows. We had no problem whatsoever from the perspective of professionalism learning how to grow the number of RVUs that we scored, but I admit to a little cynicism in my words.
