A Sign That Health System Leaders Are Starting to Take Their Customers Seriously

As a highly skeptical healthcare business journalist, I tune my radar to look for dark clouds rather than silver linings. But, every once in a while, an unexpected blip appears on my screen. That happened last week when I was reading the results of Deloitte’s latest survey of health system and health plan CEOs.

There is a sign, however faint, that incumbent health delivery system leaders in the U.S. are starting to see their patients and enrollees as customers and take their needs seriously if only to stay in business.

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions interviewed 25 health system CEOs and six health plan CEOs for its latest Deloitte 2019 Health Care CEO Perspectives Study.  Deloitte released the study on Jan. 17, and you can download it here. 

Deloitte asked the CEO to rate 10 different “drivers of health care industry change” as either “major,” “minor” or as having “no impact.”

Now, you’d think drivers like vertical integration, new market entrants and technology would top the list. So would I. But they didn’t. In rank order of being a major driver of industry change, the CEO said:

1. Shift in care setting
2. Proactive consumers
3. Quality-based payment methods
4. Digital transformation
5. Shift to Medicare and Medicaid
6. Workforce challenges
7. Competition from consumer tech
8. Private equity investment
9. Focus on prevention
10. Consolidation

The rest of the study is usual consultant-speak, but that ranking jumped out at me as something big. It told me that health system and health plan leaders, or at least the ones Deloitte interviewed, know that their future depends on providing and financing care in the most convenient and most effective settings because patients and enrollees, as customers, have more choices and will decide where to get care.

“The most innovative CEOs are investing heavily to bring the customer experience in health care closer to the standards set by other industries,” the study said.

Is that really new and genuine? Or, is it something that the CEOs know people want to hear right now? I looked at the results of similar surveys that Deloitte did of health system CEOs in 2015 and 2017 to get a sense of whether things really are changing.  

In the 2015 survey of 19 health system CEOs, which you can download here, “more than half” of the CEOs “agreed that health care is transforming into a consumer-centric model,” Deloitte said. Further, “Re-envisioning the patient as consumer has already begun to change medicine; they expect this evolution will likely continue over the next 10 years,” it said. In short, patients as customers is happening but slowly so I’ll leave it for the next guy to figure out.

In the 2017 survey of 20 hospital and health system CEOs, which you can download here, Deloitte broke the results and its commentary into six chapters. The sixth and final chapter was on “making the business of health care consumer-centric.” Maybe I’m reading too much into the flow of the report, but someone decided to put patients as customers last perhaps as a reflection of what they saw as the lowest of six priorities of their health system executive audience.  

Hey, I could be grasping at straws here, and the blip on my screen could be a crumb from my tuna salad sandwich. But I’m looking for any sign that the people who run our healthcare system with more than $4 trillion in projected annual spending this year finally see serving their customers as their raison d’etre.

Thanks for reading.