Health insurers may be shocked to hear that a new survey revealed that people think credit card companies and supermarkets could predict their customers’ health habits better than they do.
The survey of attendees of the two day patient engagement conference this week in Washington, D.C. — ENGAGE — was done by Seamless Medical Systems. The findings reflect 93 responses.
About 41 percent said they believed credit card companies knew the most about their health habits and 29 percent said supermarkets would know best. Healthcare insurers scored a distant 17 percent.
Doctors got a measly 9 percent. That’s a bit surprising considering how much attention health insurers have been getting for their interest in big data and using it to develop a better sense of their members’ health. Still, it’s relatively new for health insurers to do this compared with, say, the life insurance industry. One data mining CEO interviewed by The Economist said he would pay cash for junk food rather than put it on a credit card, lest his health habits be tracked.
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Asked whether or not they agreed that healthcare services member benefits are becoming so similar that emotional, customer touch-points will be the best way to differentiate healthcare services in the future, 67 percent said they strongly or somewhat agreed. Nearly 10 percent disagreed strongly or somewhat with that statement.
Responses to the question of which sectors are doing the best job with patient engagement earned some props for pharmaceutical companies, chosen by 18 percent of respondents, but technology was the favorite and picked by almost half, 49 percent, of respondents.
Opinions were decidedly mixed on consumer loyalty to healthcare brands. More than 30 percent said consumer loyalty is less than it was five years ago. Another 27 percent said they weren’t sure, but about 20 percent said it was better than it was five years ago.
Given the choice of three measures they would like to see on a wristwatch that would give them a continual score of how healthy they are, participants picked daily motion (73 percent) heart rate (70 percent) and sleep (52 percent).
