I'm going to a national forum on market-driven healthcare strategy beginning this Sunday, April 6 here in Phoenix, part of the ongoing healthcare marketing conversation leveraged by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists. One of the breakout sessions uses a case study to illustrate retail healthcare strategy for hospital systems. The presentation will be given by Michael O'Neal, Sr VP/COO of Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend Indiana.
The blurb on the conference prospectus forecasts more than 2000 retail clinics by the end of this year. Six weeks ago, I attended the Healthcare Financial Management Association's 2008 Executive Summit, and one of the best presentations came from a team of senior Deloitte consultants, John Bigalke and Glen Feinberg, who spoke of Five Strategic Shifts in Healthcare Business. One of these disruptive innovations, retail medicine, was substantiated as a strategic vector which will forever change the game for traditional providers of health care goods and services.
This coming change has been signaled by the increased use of personalized care management tools to enable consumer control of health decisions and purchases, increased integration of healthy environments and conventional health goods and services in community-based health system design and management, and increased use of in-home and mobile monitoring care management devices.
These guys are all predicting that health care consumerism will change how health is accessed and delivered in this country. But are hospitals and physicians ready for this change?
Anytime I engage with decision-makers in these circles the impact of retail healthcare is minimized in their views. Indeed, the recent closing by Walmart of over 800 in-store clinics, according to these leaders, heralds an end to self-diagnosis and treatment tendered by mere technicians. Notwithstanding the fact that Walmart closed following the mismanagement of Medicare billing such that their receivables were 180 days and getting older, these decision-makers may have a point. And yet, I wonder about the greater impact of retail medicine.
In the later half of the 1990's America saw the incredible growth of retail digital imaging centers. For a significant out-of-pocket expense, you could take a break from your shopping, lie back on a table, and get a full or partial body scan that would let you know the state of the inside of your guts. Are you rife with polyps? Are your joints deteriorating? What about the health of your kidneys?
The experiment took a turn for the worse when there simply weren't enough people streaming in with $1000 extra disposable income at their local mall to support operations and the substantial payback on capital intensive imaging machines. But while the retail scanning business began to die, something happened to the overall perception of the healthcare consumer in this country. People began to realize that their health actually BELONGED TO THEMSELVES!
Up until this point and since the days of Hippocrates, control over our own health was the exclusive domain of the physician and the environment in which he/she practiced. This shift to retail healthcare is changing the way we think about our own health as individuals, newly empowered in the society. It is a remarkable opportunity, and a scary shift in health at the same time.
What will this mean to the practice of medicine? In what capacities can physicians and hospitals still shine? And if the trend continues to have an indelible impact on the future of health care delivery, what can physicians and health systems do to collaborate with their customers to create a better tomorrow for everyone in the Future of American Healthcare?
----Michael
Care providers' transparency is key especially with my new medical savings account. How much will this cost? Why does it cost more here? Where can I buy comparable services with less dollars?
Posted by: Mike Cylkowski | April 03, 2008 at 05:37 PM