“Consumer Driven Health Care”, Fad or Reality?

Consumer Driven health care is a industry term for basically… allowing consumers, ie patients, to be better informed about where and how they receive their medical care. It is a rising tidal wave that has not yet caught on with the actual health care consumer…but, is a force to be reckoned with on the corporate side. There are companies that are responding to anticipation of empowering the health care consumer.

What do I mean by empowering the health care consumer?

This “empowerment” is “code” for giving the consumer information about quality, performance and price in regards to health care. The theory is that is a consumer who knows how much a procedure costs at various institutions and weighs this against the quality or “grading” of the delivering doctor or hospital, they will make a better choice and ultimately drive down health care costs and improve health care results.

This is still unproven and controversial. Doctors would argue that there is no meaningful way to “grade” them either based on financial variables or health care outcomes. Often better doctors have sicker , more complicated patients, resulting in more expensive care with less desirable results. The other issue is that if doctors “grade” becomes so important as to impact their bottom line, docs will change the way they practice to get better results both on the expense and health care results side. For instance, they may choose to only treat healthier patients, insuring better outcomes and less expensive insurance costs, so called, “cherry picking”.

In a recent health care congress sponsored by the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, Al Hubbard, assistant to President Bush for economic policy, issued a threat to clinicians: “Make pricing information available without being forced. If you do not do so, we will force you to. We have allies in Congress who are very inclined to be prescriptive with legislation to impose pricing and quality standards on the health care community”. I think that does sound like a clear cut threat, do it, or we will make you do it approach.
Regardless, what is best for doctors, society and patients, is not necessarily aligned.

As a patient, what do you think? What about the doctors that are reading this, what are your thoughts?

We, at PassportMD, Inc. feel very strongly that you can empower the patient, improve health care and at the same time, not threaten a physician’s practice approach. The very first step in this process is giving the healthcare consumer access to their own personal health record (PHR), http://www.passportmd.com/ gives consumer a free Personal health record so , at the very least, they can be better informed regarding their own health and well-being, and pass this information to their provider whenever necessary. This is step 1 in the empowerment process..