Healthcare Must Leverage Tech To Boost Consumer SatisfactionHealthcare Must Leverage Tech To Boost Consumer Satisfaction

Health IT Pros Face Salary Gap

The healthcare industry is starting to follow in the footsteps of other industries that have undergone disruptive changes because of the Internet, says a new report from PwC's Health Research Institute. But a national survey of 6,000 consumers shows that healthcare still has a long way to go to improve the customer experience.

Comparing findings across the banking, hospitality, airline, and retail sectors with those in healthcare, the report--which covers both providers and health insurers, says that healthcare entities need to deliver more personalized services to their customers.

The report cites five factors in consumers' demand for better service:

-- Increased cost sharing with employees, making them responsible for more of the cost of care;

-- Payers' push for healthcare value, leading to increased transparency about providers' cost and quality;

-- Consumers' desire for "on-demand" healthcare via mobile health, telemedicine, social media, and retail clinics;

-- Growing online access to personal health information; and

-- The prospect of increased competition among insurance companies for customers on the new state insurance exchanges.

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To be sure, there are some big differences between consumer attitudes in healthcare and in other industries. For example, only 8% of respondents regarded cost as the biggest factor in choosing a healthcare provider, far less than those who cited price in making purchases from hotels, retailers, airlines, or health insurers. Conversely, 42% of consumers cited personal experience and 9% indicated word of mouth as factors influencing provider choice. Those percentages were twice as high as in other kinds of businesses.

The main reason why few consumers cite cost in buying healthcare services is that most people have little idea what these services will cost before they're provided. That's according to Paul D'Alessandro, global leader of customer practice for PwC. In an interview with information Healthcare, he said that prices might be important to consumers if they knew them in advance and had a basis of comparison. Some health plans have published that kind of information on providers, but it's not clear that it has had an impact.

The report also found that young people are much more willing than older people to seek primary care via non-traditional channels such as retail clinics, phone, and Web. Ninety percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they'd engage in healthcare activities through social media. And young, urban respondents valued convenience three times as much as the other respondents, who tended to more value provider reputation.

This is not to say that only the young like convenience. Nearly 70% of the respondents overall wanted multiple services to be available in a single location, and nearly 65% valued online and mobile information exchange with providers.

D'Alessandro pointed out that younger respondents were four times as likely as older people to use retail clinics, which, in some respects, have been more responsive to their needs than traditional clinics have. But with all the health information available on the Web or through mobile apps, he added, many people--young and not so young--feel frustrated when they see a primary care doctor.

Among some respondents, he said, "there was frustration that 'I went to the doctor and found something I could have found out online or that I already knew.' This is eroding the value of the clinical visit."

Healthcare providers are starting to adopt some of the mobility, self-service, and 24/7 access concepts that have long been widespread in other industries, he said. But in many cases, they're putting their emphasis on the wrong areas, such as "queue management" in emergency rooms to reduce wait times. While there's nothing wrong with that, he noted, healthcare organizations should also use technology to learn more about their patients so they can serve them better.

In that respect, he thinks, the ICD-10 diagnostic code set might prove a blessing in disguise because it will force providers to collect more data on their patients. But that information gathering will have to be automated, and algorithms must be applied to the data to supply useful insights to physicians, he said.

Meanwhile, he added, the immediate driver for increased focus on customer service will be Medicare's value-based purchasing program for hospitals. The reason is that a third of the incentives will be based on patient satisfaction scores.

"More than a decade ago, in other industries like banking, airlines, and retail, the emergence of the Internet was driving information transparency and creating disruptive changes," D'Alessandro observed. "Healthcare somehow stayed at arms-length from this disruptive wave. But now the same disruptive wave has hit the healthcare industry. That's the opportunity we see today."