Consumerizing Healthcare: Who’s the Boss?
This is the first of a series of articles we are writing about our vision and motivation to enable a transformational change that will make healthcare massively better, for everyone.
On-demand, personalized, and predictable. These are the last things most Americans would attribute their healthcare (or more aptly known as sickcare) experience. As with most industries that are long overdue for disruption, many tried solving problems in healthcare from the inside out by making plausible yet incremental changes that aim to tweak a giant machinery to become slightly more efficient, a tiny bit at a time. [1]
Making patients the boss of their own healthcare journey.
Instead, WHAT IF we take a patient-first approach imagining a future where our healthcare experience is comparable to our expectations and interactions when using consumer-facing services like on-demand ride-hailing with Uber; one-click purchasing with Amazon; streaming highly relevant shows recommended by Netflix; all with a transparent pricing model? Can we then work backwards from these ideals and figure out what we need to build, in order to make our imagination into reality.
With a tabula rasa, one of the most important tenets is that we can align products and payers around the patient, from day one. Of course, this is easier said than done.
Starting from first principles and with a data-driven approach, our mission is to enable all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem to deliver measurably better health outcomes at scale. The contrarian argument on why it would be impossible to make healthcare affordable without compromising the quality of care isn’t entirely sound. Inefficiencies inevitably occur when the value chain is opaque, which subsequently leads to the rise of healthcare cost at an out-of-control pace evidenced in the last few decades. Surprise medical billing and increasing out-of-pocket costs are now common among Americans, where the majority have high-deductible health plans.
Question is, where do we go from here?
The value-based model we strive to achieve has been adopted in some form by a not too distant cousin of healthcare — dentistry — where price, transparency and outcome are largely aligned, in addition to a longitudinal care aspect where dentists are expected to steer patients in the direction of preventative care as opposed to only getting treatment when symptoms arise. Why should healthcare be any different?
At Veriteos, we are builders more than philosophers. As much as we argued a lot about what went wrong and the things that we wished for, we also spent a ton of time exploring and prototyping our platform approach, bringing together trailblazing partners that are aligned with our ambitious mission. We still have a lot to learn, hence we’re taking the long-term perspective in everything we do, believing there’s no shortcut in making a significant dent on the future of healthcare for the better.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Stay tuned for our next article about how we intend to do just that.
Thanks to Carlos Rodarte, Alex Vannoni and Abel Simon for reading drafts of this.
Notes:
[1] Not trying to belittle the progress that have been made in healthcare so far, but clearly it is still not giving us the outcome we’d expect relative to the total healthcare spent as a function of GDP by the US relative to other developed countries.
