Outcomes: What Every Healthcare Company Brings to Consumerism Already
In February 2020, the Digital Healthcare Collaborative met for its quarterly meeting to review research and discuss our charter. Our focus this year is on the impact of intelligent solutions on patient expectations. Consumerism in healthcare cannot be understood today without a focus on smart tools. It just can’t be. And so the members of the 2019/20 Collaborative spent the last year delving into consumer attitudes about smart tools and healthcare.
We learned through research that people’s tolerance for ‘administrivia,’ for ‘process,’ and for ‘education’ has gone way down. We asked people what is stupid, smart, and genius about healthcare. They struggled with genius things. They really couldn’t think of anything. They knew what smart looked like—and sometimes even referenced their healthcare portals as ‘smart.’ But they didn’t struggle with stupid. They filled pages with lists of things that no longer make any sense in a digital world.
Stupid, Dumb, Smart, Genius in Healthcare
When people embrace technology in one part of their life, they don’t understand why they can’t have the same level of service in other parts of their life. That’s consumerism in healthcare today. People want the same super helpful capabilities in health and wellbeing that they have other parts of their lives.
But there is something that healthcare does much better than retail or banking – or even media. What every healthcare company is concerned about is real outcomes. What could be more powerful for consumers than solutions that actually make them healthier, happier? Healthcare, for no other reason than we focus on outcomes, has the opportunity to leap frog consumer brands and become integral to people’s lives—if we can deliver on outcomes.
It’s about outcomes. Which, by the way, is also what the Collaboratives are about. Every company that participates is working toward an outcome. The program helps you move forward so that you can help your patients and customers progress.