How Do You Pull, Push, and Pay?

I was reading something on Healthwise this morning.  We recently had Don Kemper (CEO) present at our client event in May.  He was talking about “Billion Dollar Decisions: Right Tools, Right People, Right Time”.  A few key things from the overview:

• Today’s healthcare crisis can’t be solved with out helping everyone do more for themselves.
• People need to ask for the care they need and avoid care that’s not right.  (a huge information and health literacy challenge)
• Every year people make 300M major healthcare decisions, 50M surgeries, 100M medical tests, and 150M+ major medication changes.
• Patient decision aids are key – http://ipdas.ohri.ca.

The summary was that to get people to uses decision aids you have to employ pull, push, and pay strategies.

Pull: Consumers pull the decision aids from the Web.

Push: Providers and payers push contextually relevant decision aids to consumers when they need them.  (What Silverlink does!)

Pay: Providers and payers create incentives to encourage the use of decision aids.