At this year’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, everyone agreed that a person’s ability to pay medical costs should never interfere with their eligibility to receive care. With patients crying out for a better consumer-centric experience, the market has been flooded with patient portals. But are these new user experiences really addressing the provider’s underlying issues?
Forward-thinking CFOs are only just starting to evaluate how technology – and more specifically predictive analytics and segmentation – can be used to manage costs, increase revenue and improve brand loyalty.
Measuring and managing costs
Measuring and managing costs is a recurring theme for the healthcare industry, but it’s not new. CFOs have been worried about measuring and managing costs for a while. Macro trends – the significant increase of high deductible health plans, the cost associated with insurance exchange plans, and consumer’s general difficulty affording healthcare – have long been indicating this was heading our way. The rise in high deductible plans is making consumers one of the larger payers in the healthcare industry. This isn’t an emerging concept. It’s a bow wave that’s been expected, and now that it’s arrived, executives are exploring ways to tackle the challenge.
Becoming a consumer-centric brand
What is new is the vision of a future where healthcare is consumer-centric. Whether it is a provider, vendor or investor, everyone is focused on building brand loyalty around a better consumer brand. As a testament to how top of mind the issue is, many of last year’s annual reports highlight refreshing the consumer brand as one of the top pillars of a three-year strategy.
In response to consumer feedback, health systems are facing up to who they serve, exploring ways they can treat their patients as individuals, even if care is sporadic. These organizations are making a promise to their community and consumers to become consumer-centric. They are striving to rebrand themselves to ensure they can offer consistent services and experiences based on the population they’re serving. And guess what? People are relating to the promise because they feel they deserve it. As patients, guarantors, and consumers, as people with families and kids – they deserve a better experience when it comes to managing medical expense debt.
According to Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), more than a quarter of U.S. adults struggle to pay their medical bills, with an estimated 40% of Americans racking up debt resulting from a medical issue. Yet, based on the data we’ve seen, consumers genuinely want to pay their healthcare obligations. There’s a feeling of dignity when we pay your bills. No one wants their bills to end up as unrecoverable debt. But, sometimes that’s the only option when the debt is so substantial there’s no way out.
To manage the high cost of care, consumers go on the open market and secure credit cards they can’t really afford. Cards with high APR percentages attached to them only worsen the experience. That new credit card with an unaffordable line of credit at an unforgiving interest rate can quickly snowball. What happens next? They default on their payment; it hurts their credit score; hurts their standing with the health system; the health system then doesn’t get any cash. The whole bond, loyalty and trust are severed between the two entities.
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