Definition of Consumer Driven Healthcare
July 29, 2008 – 11:16 am by ScottSchoenvogelAs I spend more time at industry functions, I have experienced a number of people speaking of consumer driven healthcare simply in terms of high deductible health plan. In reality, how large or small the deductible is has very little to do in terms of teaching people to be better healthcare consumers. Our experience tells us that deductibles are often a disincentive to consumer directed healthcare decisions as many consumers think “I just have to spend my deductible and then I won’t care anymore”. It is the same reasons that hospitals experience an increase in surgeries in November and December since many patients want to get surgeries completed before the deductibles resets in January for the new plan year.
As an industry, we need to focus on helping people become better healthcare consumers by teaching them to use cost and quality information to make value based healthcare decisions. Since the patient is the only one who can influence the ordering habits and decisions of physicians, this is the only way to change industry behavior and bring some rationality to healthcare costs.
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