“HealthCare Built Around You” — Migration of value from care provider to user
When it comes to healthcare, we are used to a transactional model, with payment directly proportional to number of services or consultations provided. This leads to a model centered around the care-provider, with the focus being on quantity as opposed to quality.
Such a model fits in well with communicable diseases, having random occurrence and a shorter treatment duration. However, rapid urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, changing diet, and rising obesity have fueled an increase in lifestyle ailments (non-communicable diseases). Most prominent amongst these are cancer, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. This shift from communicable diseases to long-term chronic illnesses poses challenges to the orthodox payment model.
This results in a conflict of interest — incentivizing care-givers based on visits, procedures, and tests; not necessarily in line with treatment outcome, patient health and wellness. This often leads to lack of transparency for the patient, driven by a feeling of being left out of the overall decision making process.
With the advent of continuous health monitoring devices and trackers at an affordable cost, coupled with changing consumer behavior in the digital age towards preference to transparency, standardisation, ability to track progress and information spread in social media, we feel there will be a shift in value towards services with more patient centric approach.
Any new model would require a lot of deliberation, and government regulation/ support. But a starting point could be considering moving towards a packaged payment-model, involving a single, combined payment for all services in a particular condition. Thus resulting in a transparent process where the payment amount is known beforehand. This would help realign incentives of the care-giver towards improving outcomes faster, avoid overheads expensed from the patient and help us move towards more personalised and preventive healthcare.
A user-centered approach to healthcare makes the patient feel known, respected, empowered, engaged, and knowledgeable. Research also links user-centered care to positive outcomes, including improved physician-patient communication and relationships, higher patient satisfaction, better recall of information and treatment adherence, better recovery, and improved health outcomes
source : https://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/healthcare/value-based-healthcare.pdf, NeoDocs research
