Why House Calls Are Back: The Rise of Customer-Centric Primary Care
What is customer-centric primary care?
When you think about a primary care visit, you might imagine having to dig out your health insurance card, go online to double check that your doctor is “in network,” (after all, coverage changes all the time, and if you change employers you have to start all over again), making a phone call (during “normal business hours” of course), being put on hold, and finally, if you’re lucky, scheduling an appointment before your health issue goes away on its own. When the day finally comes, you take time off work, wait in a gross waiting room, step on the scale that seems to add five pounds to everyone, speak to the doctor for four minutes, pay anywhere from 0 to 100 bucks, and leave–possibly to be billed again later.
Not very customer centric, is it? Nice Healthcare’s Chief Experience Officer, Steve Bayer recently sat down with Darrell Moon, CEO of Orriant, at the Aspirational Healthcare digital conference to talk about customer centricity in primary care. Here are the highlights:
Healthcare should be as convenient as DoorDash.
It’s time to adopt in-person and virtual care the way other industries have embraced convenience without sacrificing quality. We don’t carry paper maps in our cars anymore because we have real-time maps at our fingertips. We don’t get paper paychecks and cash them at the bank anymore because direct deposit gives us our funds instantly and with no fuss. There really isn’t any reason healthcare can’t be the same.
Healthcare can be more affordable, too.
We’re so used to paying hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars a month in premiums, then paying again when we go for a visit. Sometimes we get a surprise bill later on. This discourages people from getting the care they need. It’s time to make healthcare costs transparent, affordable, and easy to understand. The customer-centric primary care that Nice provides doesn’t use insurance at all–it’s a benefit that’s already been paid for by the employer. People simply get the care they need when they need it. No wondering “is it worth the cost” to get things checked out as they arise.
There’s plenty of room to avoid costs in traditional healthcare.
If you take away the “bricks and mortar,” that also means you take away all of the costs associated with maintaining physical clinics. Furthermore, when you remove insurance from the equation, you remove all the administrative work (and therefore cost) that accompany that as well. Simplifying care with a customer-centric model doesn’t just make care more appealing; it makes it more affordable, too.
Doctors are tethered to turnover, instead of quality–and that hurts them and patients.
In order to get paid, doctors need to pack their schedules and see as many patients as possible. Patients can rarely be seen on short notice (when they need to be seen the most), which means doctors are losing patients to urgent care centers and emergency rooms. Meanwhile, they’re spending valuable time triaging patients with minor problems, prescribing basic meds, and other visits that could have been done virtually rather than in-person. Revamping how care is delivered drives patients where they need to go to get the most appropriate care in the moment.
The system is designed to only address mental health and musculoskeletal conditions when it’s too late.
While there may be “preventive care” available to identify conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes, many health plans don’t cover mental health services or physical therapy. When people begin to develop anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions, there’s a cost barrier. Similarly, when experiencing a musculoskeletal issue (back pain, neck pain, etc.), patients are driven to traditional covered services including surgery. Meanwhile, many of those conditions could be treated and resolved with physical therapy, but cost remains a deal breaker.
Watch the full interview for more in-depth insights on the value of customer-centric primary care.
