MedCity Influencers, Patient Engagement

In a ‘buy now’ world, how can healthcare providers better serve patients?

Last year, millennials (people aged 15 to 34) surpassed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation. It's high-time healthcare providers embrace that demographic shift.

From ordering a pizza to hailing a cab, the millennial generation has grown up in a world where getting service is as easy as clicking a button.

However, healthcare providers have admittedly been among the bigger laggards in what some call the “Amazonification” of customer service. It’s for good reason: Scheduling a PET scan or managing congestive heart failure is nothing like ordering the latest season of “Game of Thrones” or selecting the color of your MINI.

Yet, I believe our industry has reached a tipping point. We have no choice but to innovate to meet the shifting expectations of patients — who want easy to access and efficient service — and to confront the realities of the marketplace:

  • Last year, millennials — which the U.S. Census Bureau defined as people ages 15 to 34 in 2015 — surpassed baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation
  • Healthcare spending is rising at an unsustainable pace, expected to top 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product by 2025.
  • Social media and smartphones have created an information age that has fundamentally changed the way we live.

The big question: How we do incorporate more “consumer-like” practices without sacrificing the quality of patient care?

Better access
Millennials’ desire for healthcare services where and when they want them is one of the driving forces behind the proliferation of hospital-owned urgent care centers. In the future, we also need to look beyond acute encounters and integrate access to care into a patient’s daily life. It goes well beyond online scheduling and communicating with physicians by text or e-mail.

Our hospital’s primary care practice is having success with a patient-centered medical home model. Physicians collaborate with a team of dieticians, therapists, nurses and other professionals to ensure patients receive care when they need it — right down to phone calls to ensure they are taking their medication. This additional “access” has reduced hospital admissions and ER visits and has resulted in greater satisfaction among patients and their family caregivers.  

Lower costs
With rising deductibles and co-pays, millennials are arguably more aware of healthcare costs than any prior generation. Traditional cost-saving measures such as delegating more responsibility to physician extenders, including nurse practitioners and physician assistants, can only go so far. Providers are going to have to take on more financial risk to ultimately lower costs while still improving quality of care.

For example, we created a pilot program with a nephrologist where community physicians can temporarily refer patients with uncontrolled hypertension. The program’s success has been immeasurable in terms of bringing the participants’ blood pressure under control, which we expect will avoid costly hospitalization in the future. These types of programs don’t fill hospital beds, but they are the right way to care for patients — and we strongly believe investments in lower cost, higher quality care result in greater loyalty across our entire referral base.

Greater transparency
Electronic medical records have led to an explosion in the number of “scorecards” intended to measure whether a hospital or a doctor provides quality care. Millennials are no doubt using ratings by organizations such as the Leapfrog Group and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to influence their choice of providers for themselves or their aging parents.

While we should welcome this transparency, healthcare providers need to push for greater consistency in how these numbers are gathered, interpreted and reported. In some cases, hospitals are finding that simply the way they code a procedure for billing can affect quality ratings. These scorecards are in their infancy, and healthcare providers need to be active participants in how they evolve in the next 10 to 20 years.

Reputation management
The flipside of greater transparency is that consumers are more likely to turn to popular but less reliable sources for information on healthcare quality, including social media and sites where patients can post reviews. These reviews are increasingly having an impact on healthcare decisions in the same ways sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are affecting hotels and restaurants. Healthcare organizations need to know what’s out there and how to manage it.  

Our public relations and communications department is using analytics to gather online feedback from a variety of sources with the hope of turning it into operational improvements. Meanwhile, we are looking to proactively add existing Press Ganey surveys to the physician profiles on our own website. This will create a greater online presence for our doctors and programs, and it will be largely within our control.

In the future
As millennials age during the next 50 years, I expect we’ll see the acute care system continue to evolve with more ambulatory care to deliver efficient service at lower costs. Physician extenders will continue to play a greater role. I’m also hopeful this generation will embrace healthier lifestyles and preventive care, which would have a far greater impact on the future of healthcare than anything we could do as providers.

The challenge ahead is meeting the consumer-like demands of patients in an industry that, by nature, has to be more risk averse. When innovation fails in healthcare, the consequences are far more serious than when innovation fails in retail or other industries. The things that new technologies allow us to do — from providing online physician consultations to mail-order genetic screening — have to be balanced with whether they are good medicine.

Photo: triloks, Getty Images


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John T. Gribbin

John T. Gribbin is the President and Chief Executive Officer of CentraState Healthcare System. Prior to joining CentraState in 2000, he was a founding member and served as Executive Vice President of Meridian Health System, and prior to that as President of The Medical Center of Ocean County. His extensive and successful career in healthcare administration spans more than 30 years. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in 1974 and Rider University with an M.B.A. in Finance in 1979.

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