Category Archives: Consumer Care Consumption Patterns

CVS Health to launch a virtual-first primary care platform

Posted on by • Posted in Chronic Condition Management, Competition, Consumer Care Consumption Patterns, Consumer Engagement, Consumer Needs, Consumer Preferences, Consumer-Centered Care Pathway, Consumer-Centric, Coordinated Care, Digital Access, Digital Channels, Digital Health, Disruption, Disruptive Technology, Integrated Delivery System, Medication Management, Mental Health, On Demand Care, Primary Care, Primary Care Delivery Model, Primary Care Strategy, Virtual Care Strategy, Virtual Healthcare, Virtual Visit, Virtual-First Care Platform • Leave a comment

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The digital platform is designed to provide consumers with a coordinated healthcare experience across care settings. It’s being sold to Aetna’s fully insured and self-insured plan sponsors, as well as CVS Caremark clients, and is due to go live next year. According to CVS Health, the new offering “enables consumers to choose care when and where they want,” whether that’s virtually, in a retail setting (including at a MinuteClinic or HealthHUB), or through at-home services.

Patients will have access to primary care, on-demand care, medication management, chronic condition management, and mental health services, as well as help in identifying other in-network care providers. 

The Gist: CVS Health has been working to integrate its retail clinics, care delivery assets, and health insurance business. This new virtual-first care platform is aimed at coordinating care and experience across the portfolio, and streamlining how individuals access the range of services available to them.

CVS is not alone in focusing here: UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, and others have announced virtual-first health plans with a similar value proposition. Any payer or provider who aims to own the consumer relationship must field a similar digital care platform that streamlines and coordinates service offerings, lest they find themselves in a market where many patients turn first to CVS and other disruptors for their care needs. 

Hospital giants bet big on hospital at home

Posted on by • Posted in Care Management and Coordination, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Consumer Care Consumption Patterns, Consumer Preferences, Consumerism, Home-Hospital Care, Joint Venture, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Waiver • Leave a comment
The Weekly Gist: The Unmasked! Edition
Mayo Clinic Kaiser Permanente invest in Medically Home

This week Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente announced a $100M joint investment in Boston-based Medically Home, a provider of virtual hospital solutions. Founded in 2016, Medically Home is one of a handful of companies that coordinate with hospitals and doctors to provide in-home clinician visits, round-the-clock communications and monitoring, and access to support services to enable hospital-level care in the home. While interest has surged during the pandemic, the first hospital at home programs launched in the 1990s, and the model has a proven track record of delivering care that is lower cost and clinically equivalent (or better), when compared to a traditional hospital admission. 

A confluence of market forces has driven rapid expansion in the model across the past year. Health systems are increasingly looking to hospital at home to address emerging consumer demand for care outside the hospital, and achieve the longer-term goals of providing flexible, lower-cost acute care capacity. And payers are looking to add hospital at home capabilities to their growing virtual and home-based care platforms to manage acutely ill Medicare Advantage beneficiaries in a lower-cost care setting.

Early adopters estimate that as many as 30 percent of patients admitted to hospitals today could be candidates for treatment at home. The large infusion of funding from Kaiser and Mayo will enable Medically Home to scale across the US, and also provides an endorsement of, and commitment to, the care model from these respected systems, which may help convince physicians who remain skeptical.

Coupled with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ waiver program, allowing payment for home-hospital care, this investment should drive a new wave of growth in the model—and will likely make hospital at home a routine part of the care options available to patients.

Asking the wrong questions about telemedicine’s impact

Posted on by • Posted in Access, Access & Quality of Healthcare, Consumer Care Consumption Patterns, Consumer Focus, Consumer Preferences, Consumer-Centered Care Pathway, Consumerism, Health Policy, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Pent-up Demand, Primary Care, Primary Care Delivery Model, Primary Care Strategy, Telemedicine, Virtual Care Strategy, Virtual Healthcare, Virtual Visit • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/da8db2c9bc41/the-weekly-gist-april-23-2021?e=d1e747d2d8

Telemedicine – Creating Positive Impact in Healthcare – iPatientCare

A new study out this week revived an old argument about whether telehealth visits spur more downstream care utilization compared to in-person visits, potentially raising the total cost of care. Researchers evaluated three years of claims data from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to compare patients treated for an acute upper respiratory infection via telemedicine versus an in-person visit, finding that patients who used telemedicine were almost twice as likely to have a related downstream visit (10.3 percent vs. 5.9 percent, respectively).

They concluded that these increased rates of follow-up likely negate any cost savings from replacing an in-person encounter with a less costly telemedicine visit. 

Our take: so what? The study failed to address the question of whether a telemedicine visit was easier to access, or more timely than an in-person visit. Further, it evaluated data from 2016-2019, so the results should be caveated as pertaining to the “pre-COVID era”, before last year’s explosion in virtual care. Moreover, it’s unsurprising that patients who have a telemedicine visit may need more follow-up care (or that providers who deliver care virtually may be more aggressive about suggesting follow-up if symptoms change).

This focus on increased downstream care as a prima facie failure also ignores the fact that telemedicine services likely tap into pent-up, unmet demand for access to care. More access is a good thing for patients—and policymakers should consider that limiting reimbursement for virtual access to primary care (which accounts for less than 6 percent of total health spending) is unlikely to deliver the system-wide reduction in healthcare spending we need.

In need of more nuanced consumer segmentation

Posted on by • Posted in Consumer Care Consumption Patterns, Consumer Engagement, Consumer Preferences, Consumer Segmentation, Consumerism, Core Competencies, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Market Segmentation, Marketing, Strategy • Leave a comment

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Image result for Healthcare In need of more nuanced consumer segmentation

As “consumerism” becomes an ever-greater focus of health system strategy, we’ve begun to field a number of questions from leaders looking to develop a better understanding of consumers in their market.

In particular, there’s a growing desire for more sophistication around consumer segmentation—understanding how preferences and behavior differ among various kinds of patients. 

Traditional segmentation has largely been marketing-driven, helping to target advertising and patient recruitment messages to key groups. For that, the old-school marketing segments were good enough: busy professionals, the worried well, the growing family, and so forth.

But as systems begin to develop product offerings (telemedicine or home-based services, for example) for target populations, those advertising-based segments need to be supplemented with a more advanced understanding of care consumption patterns over time. Segmentation needs to be dynamic, not static—how does a person move through life stages, and across care events, over time?

A single consumer might be in different segments depending on the type of care they need: if I have a new cancer diagnosis, that matters more than whether I’m a “busy professional”, and my relevant segment might be different still if I’m just looking for a quick virtual visit.

Layered on top of demographic and clinical segments is the additional complexity of payer category—am I a Medicare Advantage enrollee or do I have a high-deductible exchange plan? 

With consumers exercising ever greater choice over where, when, and how much care to receive, understanding the interplay of these different kinds of segments is fast becoming a key skill for health systems—one that many don’t currently have.