A recent “Future of Healthcare” breakfast hosted by the San Francisco Business Times offered what I am sure it thought was a panel representing the full-spectrum of health care players. One group was absent: patients.
This missing piece became more obvious over the course of the two hours. To a person, the panelists – doctors, lawyers and business chiefs — said reducing the cost and improving the outcome of health care requires “consumer engagement.”
Such settings are always good for the public relations professional’s version of people-watching — eavesdropping on the conversations of experts in hopes of discovering whatever fresh set of actionable key words and phrases might emerge. This notion of “consumer engagement” floated to the top of the list. Trouble is, from the vantage point of advocacy, it is unlikely to be of much use.
No one gets far by calling out consumers and we consumers rarely get and stay engaged in anything, even if we benefit. People still text and drive, smoke, never pay sales tax on the Internet and, in an ironic twist, call in sick when we are not ill.
The problem is compounded by the fact that in most areas of consumer action, surrogate groups (like the Consumer Federation of America) do the heavy lifting. But when it comes to our health, it cannot be turned over to anyone else. If lower costs and better outcomes depend on patient action, it will be a steeper climb than even the pessimists calculate.
The smartest providers are those who recognize our capacity not to act in our self-interest. Instead they are making it as easy as possible for people to stumble forward into better health. They are building a community based set of services that is easy to access, aligns with identified needs, focuses on illnesses that can be cured or managed short of hospitalization and are rooted where patients live.
This becomes mandatory when one hears, though the best way to lower costs is to prevent problems, we spend just 1.5 percent of our health care dollar on prevention or that the cost of the same procedure can vary wildly in the same market or, as Bill Kramer, Executive Director National Health Policy, Pacific Business Group on Health said, a company like Starbucks can spend as much on healthcare as it does on coffee beans.
This reality has clearly motivated government, medical professionals and business. The task now if for this group to collaborate in a way that will not just motivate consumers, but keep them engaged.
