Healthcare Consumerism: One Study Finds Hospital Organizations Falling Behind in Addressing Consume…

Earlier this summer, the Chicago-based consulting and software services company Kaufman Hall released a report based on a survey, finding that efforts by traditional providers to address consumers’ demands continue to focus on bricks-and-mortar access points rather than on innovative digital health strategies. The fourth annual report of its kind, entitled “2019 State of Consumerism in Healthcare: The Bar Is Rising,” found that “An overwhelming 88 percent of U.S. hospital and health system executives agree that their organizations are vulnerable to consumer-friendly offerings from non-hospital competitors, such as Optum, CVS Health, and Amazon. Yet many are not doing enough to develop the strong, consumer-centric foundations their organizations need to compete in today’s online, convenience-obsessed, and increasingly consumer-focused world,” according to the press release published at the time of the release of the report in June.

As the June 4 press release noted, “The fourth annual report provides a lens to industry performance related to consumerism, based on survey responses from hospitals and health systems nationwide. It found that top performers kept pace with previous years, while many underperformers fell further behind. The Kaufman Hall Healthcare Consumerism Index ranks participating organizations based on an overall measure of how well they are meeting rising consumer demands across the core areas of consumer access, experience, pricing, and infrastructure. For the second consecutive year, just 8 percent of organizations rated as Tier 1 performers and only about a quarter rated as Tier 2. The most significant changes occurred in the lower tiers. Thirty-nine percent of organizations ranked as Tier 3 this year, compared to 52 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, those in Tier 4 increased from 17 percent in 2018 to 29 percent in 2019.”