Scott MacStravic, Ph.D.
While there are strong arguments for preferring a customer vs. service-line focus in managing and marketing reactive sickness care, the arguments in proactive health care are even stronger. Patients seeking proactive health services hope to:
As with reactive sickness care, patients are likely to have different goals, expectations and hopes for proactive health care, so knowing the idiosyncratic differences across patients is likely to be more important than their uniformities. People who seek weight loss for one special reason, for improving their appearance, increasing their energy levels, protecting their longevity, reducing risks of diabetes, improving their performance and productivity, etc are likely to want a somewhat different service experience than those who have another special reason.
Moreover, in proactive health, the one competitive distinction providers are likely to enjoy over the often free services and programs offered by employers, insurers and vendors they employ – is the willingness and ability of providers to customize the proactive experience to each patient. Providers have and usually have permission to use individual patient information, where HIPAA rules tend to strictly limit employer, insurer and vendor ability to do so.
And patients are far more likely to expect, indeed demand that providers treat them as individuals, while grudgingly accepting the “one-size-fits-all” approaches that characterize most payer-sponsored programs. Since payers are focused almost entirely on saving themselves money, they naturally prefer the less expensive option of standardizing proactive health services to customizing them. And in contrast to payers, whose intent is to save money, the wide variety of intents among patients will necessitate more of an individual customer focus.
And in contrast to reactive sickness care, patients experience with proactive health services is likely to be far more continuous. It should involve far more frequent repetitions of contacts with providers than do almost all reactive care experiences, often weekly or monthly coaching sessions, follow-up visits, online communications, etc. focused on engaging and enlisting patients’ enthusiastic cooperation. And this collaboration may last for months in a relatively short “project” involving smoking cessation or diet improvement, while for years, even decades with chronic and risk conditions, or behaviors that are subject to relapse, such as weight management.
Moreover, patients--even those with no lifelong chronic condition or intractable risk--may wish a continuous relationship with their provider. They may have multiple chronic diseases, for example, which is the rule, not the exception, among patients with at least one. Even when patients have no chronic disease or risk, they may choose a series of projects, each addressing a different goal.
Perhaps the biggest contrast between the service line vs. customer focus in proactive vs. proactive care is that the customer focus calls for identifying, tracking, and monitoring, as well as reminding each patient of the individual success each achieves. This should include the individual “life meaning” goal each pursues.
The action steps each patient takes individually, the success with behavior change each achieves, the progress toward health goals, and toward life quality, should all be individually monitored. Moreover, patients should be regularly reminded of their progress while pursuing goals, to reinforce their commitment, as well as their relationship with the provider who is equally committed to their success.
While some elements of proactive health projects and continuous partnerships may be standardized, in pursuit of efficiency, each should be customized to the degree that this enhances the probability of success. And such customization clearly calls for a customer, rather than service-line focus by providers.
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