Category Archives: Patient Conveniance

Patients Are Delaying Healthcare – Findings From 2022 BDO Patient Experience Survey

Posted on by • Posted in Consumer Engagement, Consumer Experience, Consumer Preferences, Consumer-Centric, Consumerism, Cost Transparency, Deferred Healthcare, Health System, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Patient Conveniance, Patient Experience, Patient Satisfaction • Leave a comment

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/patients-delaying-healthcare-findings-from-our-new-survey-shill/

Since the early days of the pandemic, the healthcare industry has faced seemingly insurmountable challenges to ensure access to high-quality care. While healthcare providers have performed admirably in the face of these challenges, patients are still seeing access challenges that are impacting their behaviors — which can lead to challenges in the long run.

In the 2022 BDO Patient Experience Survey, they sought to learn how patients feel about their providers and healthcare experience — from making appointments and interacting with care providers, to how patients access health insurance and who patients turn to for routine care.

From the survey of over 3,000 U.S. adults, they came across a few key takeaways:

 1. Delaying routine care is the new norm

Americans face a troubling dilemma: While 92% have health insurance and 91% have a regular care provider, 58% admit to delaying routine medical care in the past 12 months.

For routine (non-emergency) care, 69% of respondents report seeing a primary care physician and 12% routinely visit primary care nurse/nurse practitioner or physician assistant. Just 9% do not have a provider for routine medical care. Our survey found that Americans use a wide variety of health insurance options with employer-sponsored insurance (32%) being the most popular, followed by Medicare (28%), Medicaid (14%) and individual private insurance (7%). While 8% report having no health insurance, even those with insurance faced significant barriers to care.

Of those who delayed seeking medical care in the past 12 months, 30% cite unaffordability due to high out-of-pocket costs and 19% say they could not afford to seek care due to a lack of insurance. In addition to the high costs of medical care, many Americans struggle with a lack of cost transparency.

 2. Cost transparency is a continuing problem

Nearly a third of Americans (31%) have never tried to obtain cost estimates for medical care. When patients do not know what healthcare will cost, many avoid seeking necessary care. A critical way we can improve patient access to healthcare is to understand how patients like to obtain cost estimates.

Of patients surveyed who have sought cost estimates, most prefer to reach out to a person, with 38% preferring to contact their insurance provider and 37% opting to ask the healthcare provider’s administrative staff. On the digital side, 31% say they obtained cost estimates by looking at online patient portals and 27% look to health provider or medical facility websites.

3. Most patients experience frustration when seeking and receiving care

We know that long appointments lead times and high costs cause patients to put off care — but how do patients feel about the actual care they receive? 69% of Americans experience frustration during routine medical appointments, with having to wait for a late provider (29%), not getting enough time with the provider (22%) and having too much paperwork to fill out (21%) being the most common frustrations.

 When providers make it easier for patients to receive care, their efforts are noticed. Patients say providers make care more accessible by offering telehealth appointments (32%), reaching out to proactively schedule appointments (29%), offering walk-in appointments (27%) and implementing online/self-service scheduling (23%).

Patients are facing a challenging care environment — and so are providers. Fortunately, there are ways that providers can improve access and the care experience for their patients without breaking their budgets.

The future of hospitals will be outside of hospitals

Posted on by • Posted in Consumer Focus, Consumer Preferences, Future, Health System, Home-Based Care, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Intensive Care (ICU), Pandemic, Patient Centered Care, Patient Conveniance, Patient Satisfaction, Smart Infrastructure, Wearables • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/the-future-of-hospitals-will-be-outside-of-hospitals-b3074182-a3cb-466e-89cb-66d2a0a27a72.html

Illustration of a medical red cross with beams of light cast from one side

Hospitals in the future will look far more tech-enabled and consumer-focused — when patients are actually even getting care in a hospital building itself.

Why it matters: Hospitals were already pushing more care outside their four walls before the pandemic. COVID accelerated that shift, forcing hospitals to reimagine what’s possible to deliver in patients’ homes, experts say.

The big picture: One way to picture what hospitals of the future will look like is to look at two brand new hospital buildings opened this fall by competing Pennsylvania health systems.

  • The buildings, by Penn Medicine and Highmark Health both offer hotel-like amenities such as better food, streaming services, and better-positioned outlets for cell phone charging. They’ve also made medical records more accessible to patients, executives say.
  • But they were also designed with the belief that, in the future, only the most complex care might be delivered in them.

State of play: Every medical room in Penn Medicine’s new $1.6 billion health pavilion can be turned into an ICU-capable room when needed.

  • It added 7% in costs to the project, but made sense considering the ICU demands of the pandemic and “not knowing what the future will be,” CEO Kevin Mahoney told Axios.
  • The hospital also offers patients bedside tablets that allow patients to control the light and temperature of the room, and to activate frosted privacy glass on the doors of their rooms.
  • The benefits are two-fold: patients really like it and it can help free up staff to focus on more critical tasks, Mahoney said.

“The pandemic was an amplifier for natural trends that were already starting to develop,” Highmark CEO David Holmberg told Axios. “The complexity of medical procedures [in hospitals] is going to be significantly higher.”

The bottom line: Tech advances will change the entire hospital experience no matter where the care is delivered.

  • Wearables will provide digital biomarkers to allow better patient monitoring from the home. “Smart” infrastructure will help patients find parking and navigate massive hospital campuses when they need to go into the hospital.
  • And 5G will allow doctors to pull up massive amounts of personalized data on a wireless screen in seconds, Hon Pak, chief medical officer at Samsung Electronics told Axios.
  • “The perspective we want to bring to the smart hospital is it’s not just about caring for the condition or the disease, but it’s about caring for the whole,” Pak said.

Stop thinking of telemedicine as a “substitute” for the office visit

Posted on by • Posted in Communication, Consumer Preferences, Consumerism, Data Gathering, Efficiency, Office Visit, Patient Conveniance, Pent-up Demand for Access, Primary Care, Strategy, Telemedicine, Virtual Care Strategy, Virtual Healthcare, Virtual Visit • Leave a comment

https://mailchi.mp/41540f595c92/the-weekly-gist-february-12-2021?e=d1e747d2d8

Image result for thinking

“I don’t think we have good enough information to show how we should be deploying telemedicine,” a physician leader recently told us. “If we can’t show that a virtual visit can adequately substitute for an in-person visit, then we should be focusing on making sure patients know it’s safe to come in.” It struck us that viewing telemedicine as a direct substitute for an office visit was a narrow and antiquated way to think about virtual care.

Moreover, the argument that telemedicine visits are potentially cost-increasing if they are “additive” to other care interactions, rather than “substitutive”, is rooted in fee-for-service payment: more patient-provider interactions equals more billable visits, and with more visits, we run the risk of increasing costs.

Telemedicine (both video and phone visits) likely taps into pent-up demand for access by patients who would otherwise not seek care. Some patients could be aided by more frequent, brief encounters; this is considered a failure only when viewed through the lens of fee-for-service payment. (Honestly, with primary care accounting for less than 6 percent of total healthcare spending, it’s hard to argue that additional telemedicine visits will be responsible for supercharging the cost of care.) Of course, there are many clinical situations in which in-person interaction—to perform a physical exam, measure vitals, observe a patient—is fundamental. Patients know this, and understand that sometimes they’ll need to be seen in person. But hopefully that next encounter will be more efficient, having already covered the basics. 

The ideal care model will look different for different patients, and different kinds of clinical problems—but will likely be a blend of both virtual and in-person interactions, maximizing communication, information-gathering, and patient convenience. 

The Retailization of Healthcare

Posted on by • Posted in Out of Pocket Expenses, Patient Conveniance, Patient Satisfaction, Retail Healthcare, Walk-in Clinics • Leave a comment

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/care-delivery/report-retail-clinics-have-what-patients-healthcare-execs-want?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosvitals&stream=top

Health clinics are coming soon to a retail storefront near you, Modern Healthcare reports, citing reports from several consulting firms.

By the numbers: The number of health care tenants in retail spaces has risen 47% over the past 3 years, and could double by 2022.

  • “It’s the Walmart or Kmart that went out of business,” Greg Hagood, senior managing director with SOLIC Capital, told Modern Healthcare. “You pull right up. The parking is easy. The patient is likely to come more often.”

Everybody involved seems to like this idea. And it’s not just pharmacies and walk-in clinics. Complex specialties like oncology are also looking to storefronts.

  • Empty retail space is an attractive option for clinical practices that have gotten frustrated with the high overhead costs on hospital campuses. And a storefront is a good branding opportunity.
  • Landlords like medical tenants, too — they generally have good credit and sign longer leases than traditional retailers would.

The big question: Will this trend help lower health care spending, by shifting care out of expensive hospital settings? Or will it increase them by driving more utilization, the way retail space was designed to do?