We all can agree, I believe, that the era of patient
engagement i.e. self-managed care is coming upon health care providers like a
tsunami. It starts with the recasting of the dynamics of the health care
delivery model which are being ever more driven by changes in payment models, quality
of care metrics and technology. The more important drivers are, however, are that
patients are seizing ever more control over their desire to manage their own
health care and while doing so are becoming more representative of conventional
consumer behavior, as they have been conditioned to it in other technology driven
service sectors. Their experience in these other sectors has cultivated them to
want open choices and self-managed, instant interactions via technologies.
To
express it another way - we will see an ever increasing trend in patients
(read: consumer) moving (read: shopping) amongst care providers driven by their
perception of the availability of and the quality of the patient engagement service
component. The number of patients moving amongst providers, a number which I
will call ‘customer churn’ is driving upwards toward the same percentage levels
as in other technology driven subscription service industries. I expect to see
a 10% churn rate to quickly become the new norm in health care. This means
millions in lost revenues if not managed.
The mistakes start with care providers not having a proprietary,
robust mobile patient engagement system. The studies I see, put the availability
of such proprietary service applications being offered at less than 15% and sadly,
they for the most part have poor satisfaction ratings versus the externally
provided solutions. Bridging to the home in a proprietary manner will be critical.
Here is the real mistake. If care providers do not develop
their own high quality proprietary patient engagement applications and rather
chose to proceed to continue to outsource this function to third party external
vendors, then the technical wolves of healthcare will soon be poaching their
patients to the add-on health care services they plan to offer once the patient
base that the health care providers have given third party providers is big
enough. After all, now that they have your patients in their database and connected
now as customers of theirs, why not then offer them tele-medicine services?
Good bye customer! Call a traditional taxi owner about UBER and ask them how’s
that going? Make no mistake about this, healthcare providers must take a
proprietary approach to patient engagement. At stake are millions of dollars of
revenue that you need to protect from ‘churn’ and from future poaching.
At ChartaCares we encounter these phenomena every day and
our advice is always the same, adopt and deploy your own private labeled patient
engagement application service. Keep your customers close to home. There are
wolves out there.
