Patient-Centric vs. Consumer-Centric: Strategy Becoming Key for Rural Hospitals to Thrive

Two peas in a pod representing rural health patients and consumers For rural hospitals and healthcare providers, understanding patients – who they are and how they interact with you, each other and your larger urban center competitors – is an important aspect of patient experience and marketing strategy.

While patient care is, of course, always the top priority, the goals of being patient-centric and consumer-centric are not mutually exclusive. In fact, evaluating your healthcare marketing strategy and viewing your patients as consumers can often bring to light areas that may require attention in your patient experience journey…

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Advancing Rural Health: Addressing Market Challenges

As we begin our September blog series on Advancing Rural Health, it’s helpful to think about the challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients in America’s small-town communities. As shown in the chart below, rural Americans experience a unique combination of factors that create disparities in healthcare not found in urban areas. Market forces such as changing demographics, continued provider shortages, governmental influences and rapidly advancing technologies are changing healthcare delivery. Rural hospitals and care providers encounter additional obstacles with regard to disparate socioeconomic factors, geographical location, consumer health and lifestyle behaviors, and aging patient populations with higher-than-average rates of chronic illness.

A chart illustrating how market and rural forces are shifting the healthcare landscape.

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Opportunity Ahead: Re-Imagining Your Health System’s Approach to Patient Navigation

Image of a woman with a map, illustrating the quest for improved decision-making.Years ago, I read a parable about how to make a better decision written by Spencer Johnson, MD. It was about a business leader and his quest for improved decision-making skills as he trekked along a mountain trail. I loved the common-sense approach, and I have long carried in my wallet the book’s accompanying card outlining “The Map” to a better decision.

The Map suggests you first use your head by asking a practical question, such as “Am I meeting the real need, informing myself of options and thinking it through?” The second is a private question: “Does my decision show I am honest with myself, trust my intuition and deserve better?” Finally, The Map suggests after listening to yourself and others, you have the information to make and act on a better decision…

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The Consumer Quest for Well-Being

This edition of our #lifecare blog series explores how products that enable consumers to take more control of health needs are creating a “well-being” state of mind.

Woman in yoga-meditation pose with graphical overlays indicating wellbeing consists of good food, exercise, medicine and heart rate health.There has been a notable uptick in consumer use of products, services and web/mobile applications that cater to their increasing desire to maintain an overall healthy state of being. The connected wearable device category alone reached 453 million users in 2017, and it is projected to nearly double by 2021 (findings available here for Statista subscribers)…

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In Hospital Marketing, There Is No Substitute for Accurate Knowledge

The consumer-driven demand for goods, products and services is pervasive in today’s economy, and the service of healthcare is not immune. Rather, it is fully immersed in transforming itself into a competitive, consumer-centric industry.

Theodore Levitt, renowned for his marketing and branding excellence and considered by many to be the founder of modern marketing, offers this advice:…

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Consumer Demands Give Rise to Telehealth Adoption, and the Value is Becoming Evident

This edition of our #lifecare blog series explores how the rising consumer demand for telehealth is better preparing healthcare providers for long-term sustainability.

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Healthcare Consolidation: How Non-Traditional Partnerships are Improving Consumer Options

photo of puzzle pieces being put togetherIn our first #lifecare series blog post, we addressed how consumer knowledge shifts are driving change. Through advances in technology, in particular, consumers have better access to information about their health and are playing a more prominent role in their health-related decisions. They are responding with increased demand for more and better information.

To keep pace with this demand, traditional and non-traditional entities are joining together to provide lifecare solutions that benefit the consumer as well as the industry. In a whitepaper we co-authored with HealthScape Advisors, we define lifecare as a new, consumer-centric ecosystem that offers integrated health-related services across the full continuum of consumer needs…

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The Rise of Platform Strategies: How Healthcare Consumer Knowledge Shifts are Driving Change

cellphone with icons symbolizing connectivity

Together with HealthScape Advisors, we recently coauthored a white paper called, The Emerging Lifecare Model: How consumerism is driving industry collaboration toward health and lifecare as a new strategic platform. In the paper, we explore how healthcare strategies are shifting, creating a transformation in the financing and delivery of consumer services…

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The Emerging Lifecare Model: A Platform Strategy for a Healthy Future

For organizations that operate within the U.S. healthcare system, change has become inevitable. Several major market forces are converging to change the size, shape, and scope of healthcare financing and delivery. Born from the premise that population health management must adapt to emphasize prevention as well as treatment, healthcare is now actively transforming into lifecare. Engaging people in their desire to remain healthy—beyond just receiving treatment when they are not—is the newest requirement for sustainability in the industry.

Market forces converge, shifting the healthcare landscape to lifecare.

Market forces converge, shifting the healthcare landscape to lifecare.

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Three Solutions for Navigating Market Changes in Healthcare

picture of boat on the oceanNo other industry has seen quite the magnitude of change as healthcare. Today, nearly every facet of the industry is radically transforming as our core business focus shifts from illness to prevention. Providers and vendors are forced to transform their practices as they secure a meaningful role in the industry.

As I recently shared in an interview with the Kansas City Business Journal, “It always used to be about healthcare, and now we’re seeing it morph into life care … being able to take care of patients beyond just when they’re ill, but keeping them healthy for a lifetime.”

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