The Quest For Personalized Medicine: What Healthcare Can Learn From Retail

By Brad Bostic, founder and CEO, hc1.com 

When it comes to personalized service, hospitals, health systems, and labs can learn a lot from retail. For example, Amazon — which prides itself on its customer obsession — treats getting products to its customers like it’s a life or death mission. Meanwhile, in healthcare, where the outcome may very well be life or death, the patient is often treated like a number.

What’s more, Amazon is able to deliver its exceptional customer care at a ratio of one Amazon employee to every 1,583 customers served annually. Compare that to healthcare, where the number of employees in the business of serving patients equates to one serving just 26 people annually in the U.S., and the service deficiencies become that much more confounding. While it is definitely the case many healthcare services are much more complex than delivering a new Kindle, the disparity in service quality and number of customers served is so vast that it cannot be justified on the basis of complexity alone.

Why Is Retail Service Superior To Healthcare?

The key to Amazon’s success is its ability to access, organize, and understand customer data which powers a service that caters to the needs of each individual customer, helping them make more informed choices while also giving them a voice after the purchase.

This “Amazon Effect” has resulted in a dramatic change in customer expectations that is permeating other industries, including healthcare, as patients demand better and more personalized service for their healthcare dollar. Simply doing a quick Google search for online physician review sites reveals countless results that did not exist a few short years ago.

At the same time, new value-based reimbursement models are being foisted on virtually every provider of healthcare services. Under this model, instead of fee-for-service, providers are compensated based on the quality of outcomes and customer satisfaction ratings based on patient feedback.

To succeed in this hyper-competitive environment, providers must deliver personalized medicine that tailors the healthcare experience for each patient’s needs. For health systems, whose primary care physicians can lose about half of their patient base every five years, it is critical to foster a connection with these valuable customers across each stage of their health and not merely wait to react when someone gets sick.

A new crop of healthcare cloud technologies are springing up — some supported by Amazon Web Services’ vast cloud computing power — designed to drive one-to-one engagement among healthcare’s many constituents, including providers and patients, and spanning routine check-ups, diagnostic services, acute care, and post-acute care services.

Collectively, this group of healthcare relationship management solutions is aiming to improve healthcare quality while reducing costs. While consumer-focused apps can be accompanied by fanfare, the most valuable solutions tap into clinical, financial, socioeconomic, and preference data to create holistic patient and provider profiles, making it possible to personalize the customer experience in a way that wasn’t previously possible.

One particularly valuable application of healthcare relationship management is to actively manage and understand patient populations with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. While it’s difficult to reach these patient populations to monitor their medication usage, guide lifestyle choices, and ensure required lab results are kept up-to-date, healthcare relationship management can ensure these patients receive personalized information and reminder communications that improve outcomes. Additionally, for those individuals who are exhibiting signs of developing a chronic condition, healthcare relationship management enables ongoing engagement to be sure these people don’t just fall between the cracks. Instead, they can be guided down a healthier path to avert development of the full-blown disease state.

Today’s era of quality-based healthcare demands that providers work to deliver the Amazon experience to all customers. By treating each patient as an extremely valuable customer, providers of healthcare services will find themselves perfectly positioned to thrive.

About The Author

Brad Bostic is founder and CEO of hc1.com, the inventor and leader in healthcare relationship management.