October 6, 2007 
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I am a big reader of Money and SmartMoney and all those other books that tell you how to save and optimize your money. I found a few things the other day on savings money and what you should know about your dentist, etc. Here are links to some of the articles:
October 6, 2007 1 Comment
If you can’t satisfy multiple buyers, does the company buying health insurance matter more than the consumers? It’s a difficult question. The employer cares about the average employee being happy with the health benefits. You can’t design it for everyone. And, since we can only switch insurance on annual enrollment (or other life events such as marriage), you [the consumer] can’t do much immediately.
Over time, consumers can vote with their feet especially at companies where multiple insurance offerings exist. This takes away some consumer power since you can’t storm out saying that this horrible customer service means that I am going to stop using you.
Does this affect service attitudes? I certainly think so. I saw it on TV several weeks ago in a sitcom, but I believe it is prevalent. In that case, the CSR (customer service representative) basically told the person challenging the claim to terminate their coverage if they don’t like it.
Since the consumer is often not the buyer or influencer of the corporate decision, this is an unfortunate reality. Maybe we need another “life event” to be poor customer service. When this happens you can change carriers.
Of course, the company arguement would be that this complicates underwriting and raises costs, but why not simply tie customer satisfaction to their pay. The only way consumerism really works is where the consumer has the ability to walk away.
Interestingly, for one of our biggest customers at a past employer, we got paid cost with a bonus payment that was tied to patient satisfaction. It was risky, but it put the right pressure on to make sure the patients were satisfied.
October 5, 2007 0 Comments
This article on MSN Money has some good tips and links for things to do including:
It also quotes a few scary facts from Kaiser:
October 5, 2007 0 Comments
I saw this article this morning on exercise myths which I thought was good. Here are the myths (summarized):
October 4, 2007 3 Comments
I thought it was interesting to catalog the companies that were at Matthew Holt’s Health 2.0 conference. Many of which I was not familiar with.
MedHelp.org (interesting site which offers Q&A by disease topic with MDs and nurses)
ThinkHealth (medical management software)
Health Evolution Partners (a private equity firm)
Medstory (intelligent search for health)
Healia (health search engine)
Healthline Networks (health search engine)
WeGoHealth (disease specific communities)
Patients Like Me (patients sharing information with other patients)
Daily Strength (support groups)
Organized Wisdom (MD handcrafted search results)
Inspire (health and wellnes support networks)
DiabetesMine (site all about diabetes)
Enhanced Medical Decisions (uses natural language to look at drug interactions)
HealthEquity (health savings account software)
DNADirect (source for genetic testing)
Within3 (social networking tool for physicians)
Vimo (comparison shopping for healthcare)
Careseek (sharing information about physicians)
Health Hero – home health monitoring device
Additionally, John Sharp mentions a few other companies in his blog including:
October 4, 2007 0 Comments
This is not really healthcare specific although I believe the health of our children (mental and physical) is essential. And, I can’t tell you much about this organization, but I like the idea.
Our neighbor is having a birthday party for their twins. Rather than give them gifts, which all our kids have too many of, they are collecting candy and other things for the Birthday Foundation. I was intrigued. What does a “birthday foundation” do?
The Birthday Foundation is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization based near St. Louis, Missouri. We provide birthday parties to children in our community who are homeless, disadvantaged, or facing medical crisis.
Seems like a great idea. Of course, it’s sad to think that kids don’t get to celebrate birthdays, but it’s nice to have a mechanism to help.
October 4, 2007 0 Comments
I needed a small break so I am dropping a few things from my head to paper (i.e., blog).
Wouldn’t it be nice to get guarantees in healthcare? I was thinking about several that would be nice to have:
The key should be that we (consumers) don’t have to take risk (or only take calculated risks) when we make decisions that are presented to us by our care team and insurance company. Healthcare is still not perfect, but it seems ridiculous when I talk to people that spend months trying to figure out what is wrong with them. (Discovery Health had a scary story about a patient with lime disease on TV a few weeks ago.)
October 4, 2007 0 Comments
These are more company focused although you can think about whether your healthcare company knows this about you. To be truly effective at education or marketing to patients to drive behavior and outcomes, these are important. Interestingly, I am not sure I (or you) could answer all these questions about myself (or yourself).
I could go on, but I think the point is that today we (healthcare) don’t really understand patients. What information they want, how to get it to them, when to deliver it, what makes it more effective, and how to drive action. On the other hand, we may not know ourselves until “experimented” on with different variables.
October 4, 2007 0 Comments
So, Walgreens announced that they were going to miss earnings because of generics (oh and higher expenses). All of a sudden, the PBM stocks (e.g., Medco and Express Scripts) took a hit which makes no sense to me. [BTW – I own none of these individual stocks although they may be in mutual funds that I own.]
Walgreen Co., one of the nation’s biggest drugstore chain operators, said Monday its fourth-quarter profit dropped nearly 4 percent because of lower reimbursements for some popular generic drugs and increased store and staff costs. (See all)
“If Walgreen is receiving lower reimbursement for some generics, it means that PBMs are paying the company less for generic drugs,” Wachovia analyst Matt Perry surmised on Tuesday. “In other words, the PBMs’ drug purchasing costs have gone down. We think the selloff in shares of Medco and Express Scripts is unwarranted.” (see entire article)
At least one analyst understood. But, why would the market response this way. There are only a few reasons that these could be correlated positively. My hypothesis would have been that if Walgreens is getting less than the PBMs are making more or are neutral. This would make sense because if the PBMs paid Walgreens less they wouldn’t immediately pass that on to their clients assuming they make spread on those claims and have multi-year contracts with employers and managed care companies. And, if they simply passed on the retail costs to their clients, it would have no impact on them.
How could it be true that Walgreens and the PBMs made less?
Generics are definitely a key profit driver for the pharmacy industry. The average AWP (average wholesale price) is $40 (for a 30-day supply). Companies pay less than 50% of this. The actual costs are typically less than 80%. And cash customers pay greater than 100%. Lots of spread.
Now, of course, there are costs to fill each prescription so it is not that simple.
October 2, 2007 0 Comments
Those of you that know me (or follow the blog) know that one of my key issues is how to improve healthcare communications. I think this is where we (as an industry) missed the boat. I used to tease our VP of Call Centers that Dominos knew more about me when I called in than we did.
I was glad to see a blog entry from earlier this year by the physician that leads Microsoft’s healthcare group on this topic.
“Healthcare is a communication intensive business. Good communication has a profound effect on the quality and safety of patient care. Communication also has a huge bearing on patient satisfaction. Yet historically, the options for how we communicate with each other in the healthcare industry have been somewhat limited.”
Obviously, we have a long way to go. Many times companies simply give up due to regulatory issues or the challenges of changing behavior. The reality is that communications are difficult. It is both an art (i.e., messaging, branding, design) and a science (i.e., linguistics, data mining, targeting, personalization).
Technology will drive a step change in the relationship between patients and providers and insurance companies. This is the time to jump on board and figure out how to improve.
October 2, 2007 0 Comments
I remember when they first started letting us use calculators in school. At the time, there was lots of discussion about whether this would impact people’s math skills. I don’t hear much about this anymore.
But, if I think about it, there are many things I ignore because of technology. I probably only know about 3 people’s phone numbers since they are all in Outlook and synched up with my Blackberry.
What are the implications of consumer technology on our health awareness? Once all my prescriptions are tracked in a PHR, will I forget what drugs I am on? And, even if I do, do I care? I don’t think I do as long as the PHR (or whatever tool) is always available to me and my care team.
I certainly use a calculator today. I depend upon my crackberry. I can’t remember all my statistics since I can use Excel to calculate them and press help to find out what it means.
But, literacy about healthcare and the ability to talk in a group (virtual or physical) about my condition or that of someone I care for is important. I will certainly use technology as my crutch to store and remember information. I only wonder how this will affect our long-term attitudes on health as things become abstracted.
October 2, 2007 0 Comments
I remember one of the first thing that healthcare peope used to tell me 10 years ago when I first began working in healthcare. “Healthcare is local.” At the time, I took this for granted. Since then, I have seen all the data that shows how prescription utilization, spend per person, obesity, and many other variables vary by geography.
As I have been traveling, I was thinking about this as I noticed lots of anxillary things that vary dramatically state-to-state:
Boston and some eastern states have Dunken Donuts everywhere. They went out of business in St. Louis.
In Michigan, everyone drives faster than any other state I have been in. The other day, I was going 90 in the left hand lane and got waived out of the lane by a minivan and an SUV going about 100.
In LA, people consider an hour drive nothing. In some smaller areas, a 30 minute drive wouldn’t be considered for some normal task.
Yet, from what I can tell, many national companies don’t vary their healthcare marketing and communications per region. Why is that? Is it simply a data sophistication question? If attitudes are going to vary, have you taken that into account?
It makes me think of a project I did with a retailer years ago. One of their questions was about stocking inventory and how to develop a model to optimize the mix based on location. They had just gone through a season where some stores had excess shorts which they had to dramatically discount and some stores that ran out of shorts. At the time, WalMart had just begun their CFAR (Collaborative Forecasting and Replenishment) initiative which created an integrated application for sharing data across stores and with suppliers to optimize mix and maximize inventory turns.
That CFAR model has now become a default SAP module and created an industry association that uses the model. Will healthcare do the same? Not for a while from what I can see.
But, it is critical in communicating. Attitudes towards preventative care vary. Willingness to try and exercise and wellness vary. Perceptions vary. The most simplistic example I saw a few years back was the doubling of the success of a call campaign when the person calling [into the South] had a southern accent. People weren’t as responsive without that familiar accent.
The website for Premier (a non-profit hospital association) had some good facts about localization (pros and cons):
“All healthcare is local”: Good for innovation and personalization of care
- Widespread, local experimentation among U.S. healthcare providers prompts innovation, which as New York Times columnist, Tyler Cowen points out, makes the United States the world leader in new treatments and technologies. Innovations include the development of new drugs and devices and better treatment protocols.
- The U.S. healthcare system is anchored by community hospitals and healthcare organizations. These local hospitals and organizations are rooted in the community and are able to shape care in accordance with the needs of their specific populations, making healthcare more personal and direct.
- “Community-based approaches act as a reality check of what is doable and practical: They can provide an actual model of what works; they help identify promising practices in key areas; and they can provide lessons about how to address political issues.”[1]
But local orientation results in variation of care, uneven outcomes and high costs
- In a national study on quality of care, RAND found that American adults receive just half of recommended evidence-based care services.
- The National Committee for Quality Assurance’s recent scorecard, The State of Health Care Quality: 2006, reports huge variation in healthcare performance exists in every region of the country and in every clinical area.
- “Despite the billions of U.S. tax dollars spent on research and the more than a trillion spent on service delivery, movement of evidence-based interventions into communities and health systems is often slow.”[2]
- Lack of scale and connectedness (“buying clout”) and unnecessary duplication result in high healthcare costs.
[1] Debbie I. Chang, “Applying Lesson Learned in Communities To Programs and Policies at the Federal Level,” Health Affairs 25, no. 3 (2006): w192-w194.
[2] Jonathan E. Fielding and Peter A. Briss, “Promoting Evidence-Based Public Health Policy: Can We Have Better Evidence and More Action?,” Health Affairs, 25, no. 4 (2006): 969-978.
October 1, 2007 0 Comments
I was thinking about dieting over the weekend and thought back to an idea I had many years ago. The concept then was to create a data integration layer for the smart house that integrated the data from your multiple devices. Imagine the following:
You set a diet plan. Your virtual health coach (think artificial intelligence) looks at your daily calendar and the food you have at home. It proactively recommends what you should eat at the restaurant you are going to for lunch; orders a few items from the grocery store to be ready for pick-up on the way home; prints out the cooking instructions; and pre-heats the oven when you are 5 minutes away from home.
Over time, it plots your caloric intake and suggests workouts based on your calendar and biorhythms.
If I expand this concept, I would see this as a Health 3.0 type application. Total integration of data (home, work, health). Total transparency of information (healthcare, lab, medical, cost, quality, consumer goods). And, availability of information anywhere and anytime.
I am sure there are definitions, but I think about Health 1.0 and Health 2.0 as the following:
Surprising (or maybe not), there are several people using the term Health 3.0. Here were a few things I found:
At that point, the Health 3.0 conference will have to include folks from the establishment – government, large software vendors and entrenched health-care institutions.
Who knows when and where Health 3.0 will really appear, but I generally disagree with the opinion that Health 2.0 isn’t real because there aren’t business models. In the early dotcom days, the business models were limited. Those that figured them out – WebMD, Amazon, eBay – survived. First you figure out the concept and the value add. Then, you figure out who can pay for it.
September 28, 2007 0 Comments
I was reading the ScienceRoll blog tonight and saw this one entry on Health2.0 which posts the slides in a blog entry. Very cool.
Anyways, the blog is worth reading.
September 28, 2007 0 Comments
Assuming it is real…This is one of the worst stories I have seen about claims denial. Not only is it insulting, but it also shows how frustrating the process can be. (BCBSKC complaint)
“we have had Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City for less than three months, they have denied every claim we have submitted to them. EVERYONE!”
BTW – The blog here (The Consumerist) is pretty interesting. You might enjoy some of the entries:
September 28, 2007 0 Comments
I always enjoy getting e-mails from readers promoting new ideas or suggesting sites or events to look at. I received an e-mail the other day about iGuard which is a new company which is focused on delivering patient information about drugs as new information is identified.
It is interesting although I am not sure how much new information is discovered that is material, but when it is, I agree that I would want to know. Now, reading the website reveals that they have several concepts:
Now, it is important to blend this with a multi-modal delivery strategy which allows the patient to integrate this data into other systems they use and allows them to chose the channel for delivery – e-mail, SMS, fax, live call, automated call, letter, etc.
So, if interested, visit the website (www.iguard.org) and/or listen in to the webcast (see below):
iGuard
Live Webcast POWER TO THE PATIENTS!
The Most Up-to-Date Drug Safety Information
Sent Directly to You When You Need ItThursday, October 4, 2007 2:00 PM Eastern
Register Here!
September 28, 2007 1 Comment
Wellness is a big topic at employers these days. (And, it would be bigger if retention issues were fixed and companies knew how to retain their people.) The right programs can make people more motivated, healthier, and more productive and dedicated employees.
I found an example from eBay to be very innovative. They have launched a program called YourDinner.com which allows employees to spend a couple of hours per week (on the clock) with the company’s chefs assembling a week’s worth of dinners to take home. What a great idea! I get to save time and eat healthier and give my kids a good home cooked meal. (Not to mention it is probably a stress release.)
September 28, 2007 1 Comment
Here is a good example I found yesterday in Fast Company that reinforces one of my posting from a few weeks ago on loss avoidance.
In an article that talks about plastic bags and how bad they are for the environment. Would you believe we use 380B of those plastic bags you get at the grocery store (each year)? And, in landfills they last 1,000 years. I could go on, but that’s not the point of this blog.
Anyways, at Whole Foods, they give the customer a $0.05-$0.10 discount for each bag they reuse (i.e., reward). They get 20% of people bringing in their own bags. Ikea charges customers $0.05 for each bag they take (i.e., loss avoidance). Ikea utilization of plastic bags has dropped by 50%. People hate to lose more than they like to save.
September 26, 2007 2 Comments
If you have never read Penelope Trunk’s blog, you are missing out. She is one of my favorite bloggers and has good, controversial opinions about worklife.
I think we all wonder about the correlation between health and professional (and personal) success. She has a good blog entry today about being overweight.
“Heavier people do worse at work than everyone else, employers discriminate against overweight people, and it’s even legal to do.”
As health drives cost and impacts performance (e.g., missed hours), people consciously or subconsciously pay attention to it. We could debate endlessly the ethical issues here, but let’s stick with reality. It happens. So, how do you address it.
Some people don’t like smokers. Some people worry about people that are chronically absence. Others realize that caring for a sick kid impacts their entire team.
September 26, 2007 0 Comments
In yesterday’s USA Today, there was an article by Rita Rubin called “Routine exams may need checkup“. There were some interesting points:
I guess the questions here are:
September 26, 2007 0 Comments
JAMA just published a study on treating depression and its impact. Here is the summary from the Associated Press which hits the highlights. With 6% of the population having depression and estimates that this costs our economy $30B a year, this is a big deal.
“Investing in depressed employees _ quickly getting them treatment and even offering telephone psychotherapy _ can cut absenteeism while improving workers’ health, a study suggests.”
What did they study:
This seems like an obvious one. There are lots of therapy specific instances where we can take a more aggressive outreach to impact health and bottom line. The best way to get a program launched is have a value prop that addresses both issues.
September 24, 2007 0 Comments
The more I use the healthcare system the more I realize the issues with the system. While I was preparing to take my new job, I went temporarily on COBRA. I ended up with a few paper claims while I waited for my new insurance cards and due to an eligibility file issue which the MCO or the TPA made.
Now, I am trying to get reimbursed for the 5 prescriptions for my family. After filling out the forms and getting the pharmacist to sign them, I faxed them to my payor. A month later, I have heard nothing so I called them. They inform me that they have been processed, and I will get a check less my copay. (Sounds great.)
Then, they walk me through the claims. In one example, I paid $95 for a generic drug. Well, their negotiated rate with the pharmacy for that drug is $22. Taking out my $10 copay, they are sending me a check for $12. WAIT! What about the other $73 that I spent (times 5). I got a nice lecture on negotiated rate versus retail which I explained to the woman that I knew.
(Here is a WSJ article on generic pricing. This is where the margins exist. Cash customers often pay the average wholesale price plus while the negotiated rates for the payors are usually 60% or more below the average wholesale price. Here is a blog discussion in the Freakonomics area about prices ranging from $12 to $117 for the same generic prescription.)
All I care about is getting my cash back. They can refund my premium, claw it back from the pharmacy, or write me a check. They didn’t get me my cards or set me up right (or the Third Party Administrator (TPA) didn’t). I don’t care.
After a second call, they inform me that I can appeal it and will hear in 30-days at which time I can appeal it again. It makes me ask what the problem is and how this works for people with limited cash flow. You have to pay and wait 3 months only to likely get turned down. This seems like a major flaw in the process. Why offer paper claims if you don’t get your money back?
September 23, 2007 0 Comments
I have been a big fan of Myers Briggs for years. Every since I took the test and realized that it described me to a tee. I even took an elective in graduate school to drill down on the testing and look at ways to use it in team development and other activities.
The purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) personality inventory is to make the theory of psychological types described by C. G. Jung understandable and useful in people’s lives. The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment. (source)
If you haven’t taken the test, here is a site where you can answer a page of questions. I took it and it matched my end result from numerous testings. So why bring it up here? And, why is this entry 1 of X?
First, I am a big believer in trying to categorize individuals to make some assumptions about how to deliver healthcare information to them. This is one theoretical attempt to do this. Second, I am certainly not going to solve this tonight so I will layout a few thoughts and likely pick the topic up again.
The first category is Introvert (I) or Extravert (E). For me a healthcare introvert is someone who doesn’t talk about their family history or their individual ailments. If they feel sick, they will research it before making an appointment. Additionally, they may read online discussion groups but won’t participate. The extravert will ask everyone’s opinion about their condition. They want to tell you their cholesterol. If they feel bad, they go right to the ER or Urgent Care. And, if they have a chronic condition, they are active in online or physical groups.
The second variable is Sensing (S) or Intuitive (N). For me, the sensing healthcare person has a deep memory of their condition. They can tell you (and may even record) all the facts about their experience with a provider, drug, or disease. The intuitive healthcare person remembers the general patterns (e.g., every time I eat after taking my pill) and speculates on what this might mean. They aren’t focused on the specifics but more on the possibilities.
The third variable is Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F). The thinking healthcare person is consumed by the facts. They want to read the medical research and debate with their providers the treatment plan based on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The feeling person is much more driven by experience. If the placebo is helping them, they are willing to stick with it. Or, if their neighbor says that generics are not good, then they won’t buy generics.
The final category is Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). The judging patient is planning their care path or wellness. They participate in disease management. They go to preventive clinics. They get the flu shot even if they never get the flu. The perceiving person reacts to the events. They don’t have regular check-ups unless they are in pain. They don’t participate in any programs unless they are sick.
These are some initial thoughts, but we all know that figuring out a healthcare segmentation model that would predict behavior is significant. I don’t have the answer, but I think there is something here.
If you know your type and want to learn more, here is a good site I found. (http://typelogic.com/)
September 23, 2007 0 Comments
In a special Business Week Report, Joseph Paduda (who writes the ManagedCareMatters blog) provides a critical summary of CDHPs (see CDHPs: No Rx for Health Care). I think he makes several good points (although some of the commentors seem to disagree).
“The concept behind CDHPs is simple: People will be more careful about choosing which health-care services they buy if a big chunk of the dollars comes out of their own wallet.” [As I have said before, I thought the original intent was to drive transparency and improved quality, but it is clearly about cost shifting (oh sorry I mean savings) today.]
“A RAND Corp. study concludes that when individuals are required to pay more for prescription drugs, they don’t take them as they should. As far as drug co-pays go, increasing consumers’ costs actually drives up total medical expenses. It’s not a great leap to think individuals with high deductibles will likely wait before scheduling an appointment with their physician to see if a problem just goes away on its own. That often leads to higher costs as the patient’s medical condition worsens and grows more difficult to treat.”
September 23, 2007 1 Comment
No, I am not taking money to do advertising. After seeing this Comcast advertisement on TV about 3 times, I finally got what they were trying to say. Some made up word of “televisiphonernetting”. In the commercial, there is a guy talking on the phone while web surving and watching TV. The grandfather is trying to talk to him with no luck.
This is a good reality to think about when trying to communicate with consumers. We are consumed by our busy lives and always multi-tasking. Finding the right medium, timing, and message to get them to give you 10 seconds of time is difficult.
In healthcare, we have lots of opportunities to touch the patient. The key is doing it around an event. They are engaged for a brief period of time around a visit to the doctor or getting a prescription or going to the lab. If you can trigger messages that are targeted to their situation and timely, they will engage. General educational messages that aren’t personalized or timely often fall on deaf ears.
September 21, 2007 2 Comments
This week was the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I was not there, but I am sure it generated a lot of good discussion. Numerous bloggers were there and put there comments up. Here are a few sites for content. It is certainly worth the read if only to keep up on new technology and new buzz words. But, getting together a group of technologists focused on changing healthcare can only lead to some new ideas.
September 21, 2007 1 Comment
After trying a few entrepreneurial things, I am excited to have accepted a job working with a consulting client of mine – Silverlink Communications. [I am also a former client of theirs from my time at Express Scripts.] The role is a good mix of entreprenerial and stability since they are a high growth, VC backed company. And, one of the most impressive things is their track record of delivery and impressive clients including lots of the big MCOs and PBMs (examples).
As I was getting ready to do an e-mail blast out to a 1,000+ people in my Outlook database, I figured that linking them to the blog and answering their predicted questions here might be a good solution. I could go with the micro-segmentation of my audience (i.e., my healthcare friends want to know something different than my consulting friends) that I started to do, but it’s turning out to be more time consuming than I would like.
So here goes. Here is more information about what I am doing and why. If you are in the healthcare space, I would encourage you to look at Silverlink and give me a call. We can leverage our technology and services to help you cut costs, grow revenue, and inprove patient satisfaction and outcomes.
Q&A:
[Official PR Text] Silverlink is the leader in automated voice solutions for healthcare enterprises. Silverlink’s services enable customers to design, deploy and manage HIPAA compliant automated call programs to educate, collect information from and drive behavior of thousands of patients and members at a time. Serving six of the top ten health plans and with a customer base that collectively represents over 150 million covered lives, Silverlink drastically reduces the cost of communicating with customers while improving financial results and customer care.
We saw great results at Express Scripts. In one controlled study we ran through research, we saw our success rates improve by 30% by blending letters and calls. Additionally, access to data and flexibility were critical. We launched one new call program in under a day (either for Katrina or for a new drug warning).
Everybody is talking about consumerism and Health 2.0. Silverlink plays right into that strategy. Delivering timely information to patients. Blend their core technology with multi-modal, data mining, and experience based branding, and you have a unique opportunity to change the paradigm.
I am sure I could go on. But, while you are here, I would encourage you to look at the Silverlink website (PBM, MCO, Medicare, Medicaid, DM, Specialty/DME) and also at rest of my blog. If interested, register to get updates to the blog via e-mail by clicking here.
September 21, 2007 0 Comments
In case anyone is interested, I have had a few people ask me if I knew anyone interested in the following:
September 20, 2007 0 Comments
I must admit that I haven’t read the book yet, but it has been recommended to me by several people. (Married to the Brand) 
Instead [of volume or profit], companies should focus on an objective that merits the diligent, even obsessive attention of the company’s managers: customer engagement, and healthy brand marriages. Every manager should be laser-focused on building and protecting the company’s most precious assets — its powerful and passionate customer relationships. These brand relationship assets determine the continued health and future success of the company. (see more on the book content)
The reason I mention it is that in talking with an experiential branding expert I found their example of Starbucks very comparative to healthcare. It has died down a little in the past few years, but I have often heard people talk about how hard it is to differentiate a healthcare offering. I think Starbucks is the perfect example of a different way of thinking about this.
Coffee is coffee (with some slight modifications in taste). People go to Starbucks and one of their sustainable differentiations is the experience. It is difficult to replicate the experience that people have. That should be the focus in healthcare. How they experience the office lobby, the staff, check-in, admissions, enrollment, the call center, member materials, outbound communications, etc.? This is what will make you different.
It is never easy to quantify loyalty and correlate that with experience. But, let me use a simple example. I bet that price being relatively equal no company will switch health plans, PBMs, etc. if the CEO and/or their spouse has had a great experience with the company. There are too few great experiences. This is your chance to step-up.
WSJ Health Blog Drug Channels KevinMD Blog Health Populi e-Patients
Contact me at gvanantwerp @ mac.com.
Enabling Healthy Decisions 